Connecting with your Finance Business Partner and Management Accounts

The Management Accounting and Finance Business Partnering support has been reorganised to better support the University’s academic Divisions while balancing the need to achieve University cost efficiency.  To ensure resilience and cross-cover, we have reorganised into 3 smaller teams, each led by a Finance Business Partner (FBP), who is responsible for every Division in their portfolio but with some delegated authority detailed below. We appreciate that the academic structure Is in a state of change but this is to highlight the structure in line with divisions and will be re-mapped when the School structure has final confirmation.

 

Team Structure

 

Academic Portfolios

 

 

Each FBP is supported by 1 or 2 Management Accountants (MA) and 1 Assistant Management Accountant (AMA).

In general terms, the FBP will be focusing on strategic and material issues and queries. The other members of the team will concentrate on day to day, routine issues and queries. They will, however, work as a team and delegate or share work as appropriate; a brief summary of duties is described below:

Finance Business Partner

  • Main point of contact for Directors of Division
  • Will attend monthly management meetings for each Division, present budget reports and commentary and lead any finance discussion

Management Accountant(s)

  • Will maintain the staff establishment and related budgets
  • Primary authoriser for Stonefish/DB501s/Timesheet requests

Assistant Management Accountant

  • Support the Non-pay Review Panel spend requests

If you have a query relating to one of the above, you can direct your communication accordingly. Confidential or sensitive issues are probably matters for the FBP alone, otherwise it would probably be useful to include all members of your allocated team in most conversations. If you are in any doubt about who to contact, please email managementaccounts@kent.ac.uk and the team will redirect your email to the correct person.

Please get in touch with your team if you would like an introductory meeting under the existing Divisional structure, but we will also be in touch to arrange these meetings once the new School structure and appointments have been announced.