Philip Gravett BSc FCA

After qualifying as a chartered accountant, Philip moved out of the profession and gained over twenty years’ experience in roles with owner-managed and publicly-quoted companies in sectors including building and construction, property investment and development, warehousing and distribution, engineering and software development.

In a publicly-quoted company, Eleco plc, he held Financial Controller roles at the subsidiary and parent company level, and among other tasks, was involved in managing the process of acquisition and disposal of subsidiary companies.

More recently, Philip has acted as part-time interim FC with a charity and is familiar with the reporting requirements of the charity sector.

Assignments for clients of FD Solutions have included:

• Interim FC role with a group of companies involved in roofing contracting and a multi-depot roofing merchants operation. The earlier part of the assignment involved the preparation of a business plan and forecast for re-negotiating banking facilities, and the streamlining of daily cash reporting to enable effective day-to-day control over available facilities.

• Project management with a multi-million pound property company, enabling the introduction and implementation of a new accounting and database system over a six-month period, while the company was experiencing rapid growth in operations and personnel.

During both of these assignments, Philip has drawn heavily on his advanced skills with Excel spreadsheets and VBA macros to design template spreadsheets for use by other users to collect or disseminate data in a controlled and disciplined fashion, and to speed up accounting or system procedures.

Examples of this include:

• Daily bank transaction update – taking a download file from the bank of new transactions (up to 60 accounts) and using an Excel macro to add new transactions to an Excel file for each account. Clerical time-saving achieved of up to two hours per day.

• Designing monthly management accounts reporting packages in Excel to client requirements, that are driven mainly by the import of data directly from the accounting system, achieving time savings in producing or updating monthly reports.

• Designing master forms, partly macro-driven, for collecting data from diverse users in a disciplined fashion, for input to a central database.

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