Head of Billing

Job Title: Head of Billing

Reports to: CFO

Location: Shoreham-by-Sea (Hybrid)

Established in 2003, Focus Group is proud to be one of the UK's fastest growing independent providers of essential business technology, providing telecoms and digital workplace solutions to nearly 35,000 business customers across the UK. From our small but ambitious beginnings, we have grown into a nationwide company with over 1100 employees across 16 offices and have recently joined the ranks of Britain's private company ‘unicorns' after securing a new $1bn valuation.

The Head of Billing is a newly created role to oversee the operational and project teams who ensure the continued efficient, accurate and effective business-as-usual billing cycles and migrating new acquisitions onto our core billing system, as well as leading and delivering projects to facilitate billing quality and accuracy as we continue to scale through acquisition.

Team Management

• Lead the team responsible for the billing activities across the Group and support team managers to deliver Billing objectives.
• Set objectives (or support team managers to set objectives) to upskill and cross skill team members. Instil and nurture a culture of ongoing skill development and knowledge sharing across the Billing function.
• Leadership and coordination of resources across the Billing team ensuring flexibility across BAU and Projects - and ensuring business needs are being met.
• Integrate new team members as appropriate either from internal candidates or external recruits.

Project Planning

• Scope and define projects - and manage this through approval process prior to implementation.
• Review and input into potential projects and scope with business stakeholders, BAs and Development teams.
• Develop and own the generic integration plan that can be used as the foundation to develop the unique plan required for each acquisition.
• Delivery Management
• Continually review process and tools for efficiencies, scope, collaborate and deliver new ways of working with the team and platform.
• Lead projects following requirements definition through to deployment.
• Coordinate internal and external resources, ensuring projects remain within scope, schedule and defined budgets.
• Analyse project progress and, when necessary, adapt scope, timelines, and costs to ensure that project team adheres to project requirements.
• Establish and maintain relationships with appropriate client stakeholders, providing regular contact on project status and changes.
• Deliver plans on schedule and to expectations, managing exceptions proactively to minimise slippage or overruns.
• Track change requests and manage agreed scope and schedule changes, communicating these accordingly.
• Report project outcomes and/or risks to the appropriate management channels as needed—escalating issues as necessary based on project work plans.
• Provide weekly project reporting and insight.
• Maintain a working roadmap of when projects are to be delivered in line with business requirements.

Essential Skills

• Strong Managerial skills - ability to lead and manage teams and projects
• Experience of managing Billing functions through change or in a changing environment
• Experience of Telco, SaaS or Utilities billing and systems
• Experience of Billing direct from carrier data
• Good working knowledge of project estimation techniques.
• Strong attention to detail and output oriented
• Multi-tasking skills.
• Proven ability to bring structure to a piece of work.
• Excellent communication skills.

Desired Skills

• Prior experience of data migration projects.
• PRINCE2/APM PMQ/Agile
• Experience in scoping software improvements, or defining feature characteristics

Behaviours

• Well organised, structured and disciplined at running efficient and effective projects simultaneously.
• Team and people focussed; sound understanding of how our people drive our success
• Desire to constantly challenge the status quo and drive change and improvement.
• Tenacious in search of providing excellent customer experience in the most cost-efficient way.
• Excellent networker and C-level stakeholder manager - approachable, empathetic and proactive.

At Focus Group you can be proud of what you do, how you do it and feel a true part of the team. We work hard to create an inclusive, collaborative and rewarding environment where you are inspired to achieve brilliant things and really make a difference to the future of our business.

We're proud to have built an outstanding place to work where people thrive and are recognised for their achievements. We're delighted to have been named one of the UK's best 100 Companies to Work for 2021 and a British Private Equity & Venture Capital Association (BVCA) 2023 Vision Award Winner for London & South East for our commitment to culture and ESG.