Marnitz Van Aarde

Focussing on Sales org OPEX budget -

Goal: Support LSEG's Sales & Account Management team of Data & Analytics division in OPEX management & performance tracking against Budget. And ensuring visibility of performance & reporting to group Finance, HR and Operations functions.

Main Duties: Provide support, analyses and thought leadership to 11 regional finance managers, various internal stakeholders and the Functional Finance Leadership Team (FLT) of LSEG’s sales org of ~2100 FTE HC & £288M OPEX budget; with the aim to add visibility on actuals vs forecast / plan and enabling enriched forecasting and planning inputs.

Achievements:

Effecting nearly 4 workday savings over month-end by simplifying process and reporting mechanisms. This resulted in more capacity to support regional finance partners and collaboration with other teams on various ad hoc projects and initiatives (I.e. partnering with HR on position management; transitioning month-end OPEX forecast process and group submissions to Centre of Excellence team in India).

Focusing on Sales and Revenue -

Goal: To ensure all levels of finance has visibility and insights on our latest sales reporting actuals and, from a forecasting experience, assist in the deployment and continuous improvement of an algorithm based forecast.

Duties: Provide visibility on latest group sales results (during and after monthly sales lockdown). Assist in sales forecasting, including the deployment of a Business Unit-wide sales forecasting tool via a 3rd party vendor (and process oversight of this relationship). Own OPEX budget for Business Segment Marketing team. Review and improve month-end processes so that regional finance teams can focus on value-added insights and forecast refinements.

Achievements: Q2 & 2017 Annual Finance Spotlight Excellence award winner (1st Place) for Innovation on Sales Forecasting through Metapraxis.

Goal: Provide group-wide reporting on all sales metrics to the Go-To-Market (GTM) finance team on a regular basis; align new acquisitions onto the F&R sales and reporting platform for full visibility on Business Unit growth. Ensure simplification and efficiency in all RISK Sales & Pipeline reporting.

Duties: Same as previous roles, with a focus on continued simplification & standardization across Business Unit.

Achievements: Reduced Regional Finance Managers’ month-end timeframe for sales and revenue sign-off from 3 working days to only 1 (Global timesaving of 21 working hours).

Goal: Provide group-wide reporting on all sales metrics to the GRC Sales Finance team on a weekly, monthly, and quarterly basis and assist in aligning most of our >15 new acquisitions onto the GRC sales and reporting platform for full visibility on group performance. Streamline redundant or out-of-date processes to be more agile and aligned to group needs. Be a key liaison between Sales Ops and Commissions team.

Duties: · Create a Group-wide sales report for all product suites and 400 reps with all regional recognition rules and revenue types; all metrics required by internal customers for Finance and Commissions teams.

· Improve processes and sales recognition rules for two product sets not on existing business platforms and owned the responsibility of aligning without breaking visibility on sales & commissions throughout this process.

· Continuously improved system challenges, data alignment, changes to sales team structure, and ad hoc reporting to functional heads within Finance and Sales environments.

Achievements: Successfully provided a global view of sales to all key stakeholders in Sales & Finance streams by end of Q1 2013, resulting in commissions being calculated and paid ahead of the planned date during acquisition integrations.

Goal: Provide support to GRC FP&A manager for recurring weekly, monthly & quarterly sales- and portfolio reporting during acquisition & Integration of World-Check into the Thomson Reuters FCR segment (Financial Crime & Risk).

Duties:

Assist with the integration of World-Check into Thomson Reuter’s FCR segment wrt:

Preparing weekly and monthly group Sales Reports; updating monthly management accounts; Prepare analysis on new sales & Book of Business growth/decline

Goal: Assist Invoicing Dept. with raising invoices, addressing queries, liaising with account representatives, providing reporting on new sales and other metrics to Board members, functional heads, and the sales team.

Duties:

· Invoicing subscriptions to the World-Check database that are up for renewal in the current month.

· Fulfilling a broad range of internal controls to ensure correct revenue recognition based on a subscription revenue model (Outright/Recurring/Usage).

· Validate that commission allocation on each invoice is correct for each sales member.

· Liaising with a global account representative team to confirm outstanding details, updating user / account details, relaying client queries to account representatives for quick turnaround time.

· Prepare weekly and monthly sales reports along with other sales metrics for presentation to the Board and sales heads.

Goal:

Prove / disprove revenue loss due to subscription users not linked to active contracts or active users linked to cancelled contracts.

Duties:

Validating Active & Inactive users to their relevant contract status (Active / Inactive); understanding why possible mismatches have occurred and introduce ways to prevent both scenarios and addressing proven shortfalls.

Achievements:

Validated that revenue losses were negligible & driven by human error, not by system flaws or gaps in process SOPs.

Goal: Understand MBSA inventory management policies & procedures, and where gaps exist in daily application of these protocols, re-implement them to prevent stock losses and subsequent fines from MBSA as a result thereof. Main challenge: To improve franchise standings after significant stock loss during previous financial year to minimum MBSA standard.

Achievements:

Contract completed after subsequent annual stock take results showed a loss of 0.02% of total stock value.