Personal Assistant - Finance
Salary: Competitive Plus Benefits
Location: Holborn Store Support Centre, London, EC1N 2HT
Contract type: Permanent
Business area: Finance & Business Development
Closing date: 17 April 2025
Requisition ID: 299770
We’d all like amazing work to do, and real work-life balance. That’s waiting for you at Sainsbury’s. For a FTSE business, we move incredibly fast. When we’re not handling projects, we’re helping all corners of the wider group with what they’re trying to achieve. And around here, you can see the results of your work as soon as you walk into a store, which gives you a real sense of purpose and responsibility. Better still, the team around you will listen to your ideas and opinions, and you’ll have every chance to try something new. The sheer scale and complexity of our set-up means there’s always something else around the corner, and we’ll help and support you every step of the way. We’re trusted to get on with it. So get ready to make things happen here.
Finance - PA C3
Division/Dept.
Commercial Finance
Location
Home & SSC (Holborn)
Reporting to
Argos Commercial & Strategy Finance Director
Director of FP&A
In a nutshell
To provide a professional, confidential and proactive support service to include a range of administrative, and organisational tasks. You will be critical in supporting the Directors to be highly effective in their day-to-day role. You will lead on diary management, scheduling and preparing presentations to support the Directors in addition to taking on ad hoc project work. Build engaging relationships with key stakeholders internally and externally, as well as acting as a role model for our colleague values to support the Directors in meeting their commitments on a day to day basis.
What you need to do
- Organise the Director, ensuring their time is used efficiently and effectively
- Provide a highly confidential service that includes email and diary management on a daily basis and proactively managing long term commitments through liaison with relevant stakeholders, both internal and external.
- Support them in managing communications
- Act as first point of contact for the division, investigating queries from internal stakeholders and suppliers, taking ownership for issues through to resolution
- Read and prioritise inbound communications, ensuring timely and accurate responses are issued and responding yourself where possible
- Facilitate clear and timely communications to stakeholders at all levels
- Schedule and provide materials in preparation for meetings
- Schedule meetings, including diary coordination, meeting logistics and attendee management
- Collate and disseminate agendas and pre-reads, record next steps and issue minutes for key meetings, and follow up next steps tenaciously
- Collate information and pre-reads in advance and schedule sufficient dedicated time before each meeting for the Director to prepare, review and refine materials, including pre-wire meetings with stakeholders where appropriate
- Administrative support
- Prepare and update reports and presentation packs
- Organise team and stakeholder events, including off sites and roadshow presentations
- Prioritise, track and resolve ad-hoc requests from the Directors
- Manage the collation of departmental schedules including holiday requests and compliance with mandatory training requirements.
- Manage travel bookings and expenses in line with policies
- Raise and approve purchase orders in a timely manner, to ensure suppliers are paid within contractual timelines
- Maintain and administer systems on behalf of the team where approved; such as MyHR, Concur etc.
- Ensure information is stored in a manner and format that facilitates timely retrieval
- Summarise communication documents to ensure the team is aware of key information.
- Take joint ownership with your Director for making your team a great place to work
- Build a strong network amongst other PAs within Commercial Finance and within the wider business to ensure smooth organisation of meetings and diaries.
What you need to know
- You will have excellent verbal and written communications skills
- You’ll have strong analytical and numeracy skills
- You’ll be adept with Outlook, PowerPoint, Word and Excel
- Proven track record providing PA support to a senior manager, proactively looking ahead in the diary and ensuring that the diary is well managed and thoughtfully planned and that the Director has the relevant meeting documents
- Experience in minute taking for confidential meetings
- Proven experience of simplifying processes for multiple stakeholders
- Proven ability to organise and prioritise workload
- Ability to draft presentations and compile reports on behalf of the Director
- Ideally you’ll be passionate about Finance and/or Retail
- How to maintain high level of confidentiality
- How to use your initiative and pro-actively lead change
- How to simplify complex messages to deliver clear and concise verbal and written communications
- How to listen to, interpret and act on feedback to continuously improve your effectiveness
What you need to show
- You will be exceptionally organised and great at planning
- You will be well versed in the diplomacy and tact involved in supporting senior managers or Directors
- An ability to engage others, at all levels and across all divisions, by being credible, tactful and naturally building relationships and consensus
- Maturity and grounded confidence in the presence of senior people, responding in an appropriate manner to criticism and remaining optimistic in the face of obstacles
- Sound judgement in deciding appropriate action and next steps and tenacious in ensuring the right things are done without accepting second best
- Able to build great relationships with internal stakeholders and external suppliers
- High level of integrity and confidentiality at all times
- Able to work under pressure in a fast-paced, pressurised environment and to prioritise workload
- A clear sense of initiative and ownership to resolve issues
- Self-motivated and able to multi-skill at pace
- Strong diplomacy and ability to balance conflicting priorities
- Understand the relevant importance of issues and make judgements on dealing with the urgent, versus the important
- Contribute to a great place to work, by role modelling the values
What decisions I can make
- Make decisions and respond on behalf of your Director to a level agreed including prioritising diary requests
- Other decision-making accountabilities as agreed with your Director
Resources available to me:
- Peers in similar roles – Commercial Finance PA & wider PA community
- Leadership Team
Support we will provide
- Sainsbury’s intranet (OurSainsburys)
- Access to Sainsbury’s learning resources available on My Sainsbury’s
Please note: This role profile is aimed at describing the core output that should be achieved in this role. It is not intended to include specific tasks, temporary activities or projects to recognise flexibility in a changing context.
We are committed to being a truly inclusive retailer, so you’ll be welcomed whoever you are and wherever you work. Around here, there’s always the chance to try something new - whether that’s as part of an evolving team or somewhere else across the business - and we take development seriously and promise to support you. We also recognise and celebrate colleagues when they go the extra mile and, where possible, offer flexible working. When you join our team, we’ll also offer you an amazing range of benefits. Here are some of them: Please note, due to the volume of applications we receive, our roles may close early.
Starting off with colleague discount, you'll be able to get 10% off at Sainsbury's, Argos, TU and Habitat after 4 weeks. This increases to 15% off at Sainsbury’s every Friday and Saturday and 15% off at Argos every pay day. We've also got you covered for your future with our pensions scheme and life cover. You'll also be able to share in our success as you may be eligible for a performance-related bonus of up to 5% of salary, depending on how we perform.
Your wellbeing is important to us too. You'll receive an annual holiday allowance, and you can buy additional holiday. We also offer other benefits that will help your money go further such as season ticket loans, cycle to work scheme, health cash plans, pay advance (where you can access some of your pay before pay day) as well access to a great range of discounts from hundreds of other retailers. And if you ever need it there is also an employee assistance programme.
Moments that matter are as important to us as they are to you which is why we give up to 26 weeks’ pay for maternity or adoption leave and up to 4 weeks’ pay for paternity leave.
Please see www.sainsburys.jobs for a range of our benefits (note, length of service and eligibility criteria may apply).
