The Growth Company’s (GC) Business Growth Hub (BGH) team have an exciting new opportunity for three Contract Officers to develop and maintain robust claims and compliance systems and processes (including the oversight and processing of delivery partner claims, where applicable), to enable the efficient and effective delivery of programmes, robust verification of output and results evidence; and accurate and timely submission of funder claims, thus ensuring effective recovery of expenditure and a high degree of compliance with funders’ contractual requirements. To also provide support and guidance to the project delivery teams with regard to claims and compliance issues and compiling a high standard of documentary audit trails, as required, fulfilling the requirements of funder audit protocols.

GC BGH is a community of specialists with a passion to help businesses across Greater Manchester to realise their ambitions. Since 2011, the Hub has supported more than 15,000 businesses including start-ups, scale-ups and established businesses, providing finance guidance, creating international links, and paving the way for innovation and people development across the region. We work with the best of public and private partners, offering expert one-to-one and peer-to-peer business support, events, specialist programmes, funding and much more.

Key Responsibilities:

• To gather, verify, and report on output, results, and impacts data, ensuring a robust, fully compliant audit trail is in place for all items claimed and providing feedback and guidance to project delivery teams, as required, to ensure a high standard of documentary evidence.
• To monitor project performance and provide analysis and information to the heads of service and senior managers to enable contractual agreements to be managed effectively and to enable accurate and timely reporting.
• Where appropriate, work with suppliers and internal or external partners to ensure the successful processing of contract claims and compliant project delivery.
• Play a key part in the preparation and delivery of funder audits, ensuring audit trails are comprehensive, fully compliant, and well-presented.
• Support the process of maintaining and managing project documentation and processes, ensuring best practice and any changes to guidance is incorporated into standard forms and is reflected in procedures and guidance documents.
• Ensure that any UK Subsidy obligations relating to funded activity are fulfilled and that any required processes are effectively executed and tracked.
• Where required, provide support to the finance team to identify, verify and apportion eligible defrayed expenditure, across a broad range of financial transactions to accurately allocate project costs and produce robust and compliant claims across a number of funding streams and with a fully compliant audit trail. 

About you:

• Strong interpersonal and communication skills, both verbally and in writing.
• Ability to manage time and priorities effectively to enable objectives to be consistently met.
• Excellent organisational and administrative skills.
• Use of Excel Spreadsheets to an intermediate/advanced level.
• Numerically literate with a high level of attention to detail.

Skills Required:

• Knowledge of public funding contract, audit, and compliance requirements in particularly AEB, UKSPF, ESF and ERDF.
• Relevant degree/or administrative or / professional qualification or equivalent business experience.
• Working knowledge of project claims processing and contract management systems/processes.
• Demonstrable experience of managing publicly funded contracts in a relevant private or public sector role, commercial organisation, government / public body, NGO or a consultancy.
• Compiling or contributing to the process of compiling claims.
• A track record of delivering a high standard of accuracy and contractual compliance.
• Ability to work with complex data sets to produce information with a high degree of accuracy to tight deadlines and the ability to communicate difficult issues effectively and thus build strong, positive relationships across project teams. 

We are committed to increasing the diversity of our workforce, we provide a guaranteed interview to applicants who meet the essential requirements for a role. This commitment applies to candidates who have a disability or are from a diverse ethnic community.

As part of our application process, you can ask to be considered under this scheme if you are from an ethnic community or have a physical or mental impairment that has a substantial and long-term negative effect on your ability to do normal daily activities. Providing that you meet the essential criteria for the role, you will then be invited for an interview. Your guaranteed interview application will only be shared with the Hiring Manager and our Internal Recruitment Team.

We are a member of the national campaign Ban the Box; this campaign aims to open opportunities for people with convictions to compete for jobs. We’re supporting the campaign by removing conviction questions at the applications stage.

GC aims to promote a culture of flexibility and agile working. Going forward we will be transitioning to a culture where full agile working will be a feature of many of our roles. We also recognise that there may be a need for more permanent flexibility in your working arrangements and in such cases, we encourage you to have these discussions at the interview stage, to enable your flexible working request to be considered as early as possible.

If you require support with the recruitment process, please call us on (phone number removed).

All GC colleagues will work inline with the Health & Safety at work act and the GC Health & Safety Policy.