Williams F1

This week we catch up with our Head of Finance, Louise Evans, to find out what's been going on in Accounts...  

Despite it being the second week of our enforced factory shutdown period, the Marketing and Accounts departments are the only two areas within the factory that are allowed to keep working. From my perspective, that’s no bad thing as we aren’t a department that can down tools, people need to be paid for a start!

As such, it’s been another busy week for our department, which I head up. There are just five people within the team so we are pretty busy all year round but, as it was a little quieter with the rest of the factory out this week, we took the opportunity to allow maintenance in to refurbish our office. It hasn’t been done for a while and certainly needed a lick of paint, but it has been quite trying as we’ve been temporarily housed in a tiny meeting room!

The refurb has given us the push we needed to sort out all our systems and processes, and to have a general tidy up. During our clear-out, we’ve found some amazing records – and probably ones that we should have been more careful with as they are part of the team’s heritage. I think the best thing we found was the 1983 payroll, handwritten on pieces of paper, month by month! We also found the 1990 cheque books in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet! Both have been safely stashed away for prosperity.

Once we completed our tidy-up, it was back to our daily tasks. This month started off with me and my Finance Manager, Gary Ekerold, completing our month-end management accounts. This basically involves pulling together all of the financial information for the board and budget owners so they know how much we’ve spent this year to date and within this month itself. Most importantly, we have to make sure that we are within our forecast and that everything that was supposed to happen, happened! It’s a fairly large job, which Gary does the leg work for and then I review the information before it’s presented to the board.

Twice a year, we also carry out a secondary budget and re-forecast and that was completed this week. This is a consolidation of where we are year to date and to ensure that all of our budgets are where they should be. All budget managers had to submit their budgets before they left and we’ve spent the shutdown period going through them and turning them into a monthly forecast to make sure everything is in order. Fortunately, there were no big surprises and everything is where it should be.

Another big job this week was payroll, which we send to an outside bureau to manage. All the data has to be sent over eight days before payslips are issued, which includes all the overtime and race bonuses as well. There are somewhere in the region of 2,000 individual transactions each month in the payroll which one person in our team is responsible for. As this is people’s pay cheques, it has to be right!

To round off the week, we ensured that everyone is up-to-date on their studies. Three of the team are completing accountancy exams and Williams do a good job of providing the support they need. We then did the VAT return for the week and that was it, a fairly typical week in Accounts.