Finance Assistant
Manchester and Warrington Area Quaker Meeting (a faith community and registered charity) and our trading subsidiary, Quaker Trading (Manchester and Warrington) Ltd are recruiting a new Finance Assistant.
The main purpose of the role is to support our small, friendly Finance team with a varied set of responsibilities spanning purchase ledger, credit control and helping with day-to-day operations. This is a hands-on role that contributes to the wider mission of our charity, making sure we use our resources wisely and responsibly.
Salary: £7,862- £8,511 (£24,570 – £26,598 pro rata) per year
Working hours: 12 hours per week, worked flexibly over two or three days each week
Start date: 4 August 2025 (or as soon as possible thereafter)
Contract: Permanent, subject to a six-month probationary period.
Line management: Reporting to the Finance Manager.
Location: Friends Meeting House in Manchester city centre
Closing date: Monday 30 June (10am) – see below for details of the application process.
Benefits:
- Generous annual leave and bank holiday allowances.
- 7% employer pension contribution (subject to a minimum 1% employee contribution).
- Optional annual leave purchase scheme.
- Generous sick pay, dependency and parental leave arrangements.
More about this job and what we are looking for
Financial operations
- To enter financial data accurately into our QuickBooks accounting system to help maintain up-to-date and reliable accounts.
- To process supplier invoices and payment requests, checking for any issues and sorting them out quickly to support prompt payment to our suppliers.
- To review and process staff and volunteer expenses in line with charity policy, making sure claims are complete and approved.
- To allocate incoming payments to the right invoices and help keep track of outstanding balances.
- To maintain petty cash in line with agreed systems and processes.
- To reconcile bank accounts against our financial records.
- To support credit control by contacting customers who with overdue invoices.
- To respond warmly and professionally to queries from suppliers, customers, and colleagues.
- To manage the finance email inbox, making sure emails are answered promptly and passed on when needed.
- To support team members and other departments with finance-related questions and tasks.
General duties for all staff members
- To actively participate in training and development, working with your line manager to identify your own training and learning needs.
- To attend team and staff meetings as required.
- To follow all internal policies and procedures, as described in the Staff Handbook or issued in an equivalent format.
- To respond to customers or others enquiring about Quakers: giving them basic information and appropriate literature or websites to visit.
- Any other tasks reasonably requested by your line manager or the Executive Officer.
- Strong numeracy to a standard that supports making quick calculations both manually and with a calculator.
- Written and spoken English to the standard required to communicate effectively with people from a range of backgrounds.
You can provide evidence of these skills with a formal qualification (eg GCSE or Functional Skills Maths and English) if you have one. If not, we may ask you to complete a practical exercise as part of the recruitment process.
Essential
- Experience of working with spreadsheets (ideally Excel)
Desirable
- Experience of working in a finance or accounts role.
- Experience of using a finance system such as QuickBooks, Sage or Xero.
Please tell us about any relevant experience in the Experience section of the application form. We may ask you more if you are invited to an interview.
- Strong ICT skills, such that you can adapt quickly to different software and systems.
- Good attention to detail, especially with numbers and documentation.
- Organisation and time management skills that allow you to manage your own time well and meet deadlines.
- Ability to work independently, such that once a task has been explained you can get on and do it.
Please tell us about these skills in the Skills and abilities section of the application form. We may ask you more if you are invited to an interview.
Essential
- High levels of personal integrity and discretion, so that you can recognise sensitive information and keep this confidential at all times.
- Willingness to uphold the Quaker values of peace, equality, truth and sustainability in your work.
Desirable
- A positive approach to team working, with the ability to collaborate with a range of colleagues and be part of a supportive working environment.
- Willingness to learn and develop new skills.
- Friendly and approachable manner, such that people will be happy to come to you with questions or when things go wrong.
These qualities will be assessed at interview, but you are welcome to express them in the Personal statement section of the application form.
More about the team
We are a friendly staff team of 18 (12 full time equivalent) with a generally informal approach to work. Most of us work at Friends Meeting House in central Manchester, but four caretakers work at our other Meeting Houses some team members work partly from home.
Our most senior staff member is our Executive Officer, Liz O’Neill, who answers to Trustees of the charity and the Board of Directors of the trading company. All staff members are dual employed by both the charity and the trading company.
- You can find out more about our ethically-focused conferencing and room bookings business by looking at other sections of this website.
- You can find out more about our faith community and the work of our charity at www.manchesterquakers.org.uk
- You can find out more about the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) in Britain at www.quaker.org.uk
Working for a Quaker organisation
Quakers is the informal name for the Religious Society of Friends, which is a Christian-rooted faith organisation. You do not have to be a Quaker to work for us and our staff team includes people with several different faiths and none. However, our work is guided by Quaker beliefs and all team members must uphold our commitment to:
- Equality: respecting people, valuing diversity, treating everyone equally.
- Truth: always working openly and honestly.
- Sustainability: striving to reduce our negative impact on the environment and encouraging everyone to make more sustainable choices.
- Peace: working co-operatively and contributing to a culture of nonviolence.
We are committed to safeguarding children and adults at risk and expect all our staff to share and uphold this commitment.
Application process
Please use our online application form. You should receive an automatic acknowledgement of your completed form by email.
The information in your application will be split so that the selection panel only receive the details needed to assess how well you meet the requirements for the role. This is to help minimise the impact of unconscious bias on our selection procedure. We monitor the diversity of the people who are interested in working with us with a separate form on the Join the team page.
We do not mind if you use an artificial intelligence (AI) tool to check and improve the way that you answer the questions in the application form. However, it is not acceptable to use AI to answer the questions for you and everything on the form must be true.
Applications will close and the application form will be taken down from the website at 10am on Monday 30 June. Interviews are scheduled for Tuesday 8 July, at Friends Meeting House and we will let ALL candidates know the outcome of their application.
If you experience any difficulty with the application form, or if you have any queries about the role and application process, please contact Sara Coyle on sarac[at]manchesterquakers.org.uk or 0161 834 5797.
