RAKESH RAJWAR

People Management

• Managing a team of 5 FTEs to oversee UK/EMEA invoicing operations: Supervise, train, and develop AP staff to perform their duties effectively.
• Performance Management – Evaluate performance of resources, provide feedback, and address any performance issues.
• Recruitment and hiring- Participate in the recruitment and hiring process for AP staff.
• Resource career development planning.

Compliance and risk Management

• Develop and implement AP policies, establish and maintain policies and procedures for AP operations.
• Ensuring compliance with company policies and regulatory requirements
• Maintain internal controls to identify and mitigate AP risks, such as fraud, errors, and non-compliance.

Projects and Process Improvements

• Successful transition of AP process from Accenture to BNY.
• Insourced AP process from Accenture in Oct 2023.
• Actively participated in overall transition.
• Worked in 5 different phases to have a successful transition.
• Analyze and improve AP process, identify areas for process improvement and implement changes to increase efficiency, reduce costs, and enhance customer satisfaction.
• Implementation of AI tool (Kofex) to reduce manual effort in invoice ingestion process and streamline AP process.
• Establish and track key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure performance.

Communication and Reporting

• Communicate with stakeholders, such as Controllers, Procurement and other operations teams to ensure alignment and smooth operations.
• Reporting of KPIs such as European bank monthly KPI, OOPs reporting, Payment on time, SLA, Inflow/Outflow, Rejections, On hold invoices.

• Handling Global Invoicing team with 14 FTEs, majorly responsible for APAC, AMRS and Fund Invoices
• Ensuring applicability of local laws and tax policies
• Reviewing TDS working prepared by team
• Working closely with sourcing leads to discuss, investigate and resolve PO & invoice issues
• Ensuring timely adjustment of open items raised by Cash Rec team
• Working closely with compliance and support team on review of the existing controls adherence and on new additions in alignment with managers control log
• Responsible for managing P2P Escalation Mailbox & Helpdesk escalated queries
• Reviewing Spend Guard (Duplicate audit tool) outputs, payment proposals & taking care of payment batch approvals
• Preparing Daily/Monthly P2P Health metrics for senior leadership review
• Ad-hoc changes in SOP and handling yearly reviews as well
• Identification and developing process improvements ideas to eliminate non-value add activities and a systematic allocation of work amongst team to improve efficiency
• Publishing SLA's & dashboards to senior management on monthly basis
• Indulge in Career pathing for our resources & tracking their performances monthly

• New hire's training/Monthly refreshers/Monthly Process Knowledge Test.
• Handle Escalation.
• Creating training documents and presentations.
• Responsible for creating weekly & monthly MIS.
• Consolidation of processed volume at the day end and share with onshore team.
• Volume Forecasting.
• BQM (Bottom Quartile Management) analysis and take corrective action plan.
• Ensuring controls are in place through daily audits and share the results with onshore team.
• Root cause analysis of errors.
• Feedback secession with users.
• Invoice Processing.
• Managing vendor set up.
• Reviewing payment batches.
• Accumulating errors from different sources and analyzing root cause, further taking appropriate action to reduce errors.
• Error discussion, Motivating them for good work and Finding and Filling knowledge gap.
• Processing of VEHICLE REPAIR, utility bill, toll bills, lodging bills & reimbursement invoices.
• Contacting suppliers through Email/Call for docs required for set up.