Discover what it's like to work in our Finance team
Morgan has worked with us at Hastoe since 2019. His job is vital in enabling us to continue providing affordable homes for all our residents and rural communities. Here, we walk through what a typical work day looks like for Morgan at the moment.
9:00am: The first thing Morgan does every morning is check his emails and listen to any voicemails, so he can see what queries have come in from colleagues and tenants. He says:
Even though my role is primarily numbers-based, I have a lot of crossover and communication with other teams. I'm also in regular contact with our residents - much more so than you might expect for someone working in Finance."
10:00am: Morgan's currently the only person in the Finance team who's regularly working in the office. So to support his colleagues who are still working from home, he's been doing a range of financial administrative tasks, which mainly involves dealing with "lots and lots" of cheques and sending out letters.
11:00am: For the most part, the Finance team has been able to adapt smoothly to home working, and it's even enabled them to modernise some processes such as rent refunds. However, remote working for the Customer Services team has meant that they've been unable to process residents' payments over the phone, so Morgan has been leading on a project to resolve this issue:
We have residents who want to pay their rent or make one-off payments over the phone. So I'm working with IT and Customer Services to get an automated payment line in place, where residents will be able to call up and pay their rent securely."
1:00pm: After lunch he makes a start on preparing for the monthly rent review, which ensures that our rents and service charges increase or decrease in line with their agreements and Government guidance. Morgan pulls out the relevant data from our systems, goes over it to ensure that the correct accounts are being reviewed, calculates what the appropriate increases or decreases are and what the services charge should be. Once the review has taken place, he and his team send out letters to the residents and deal with any queries or questions that it generates.
3:00pm: As part of his role Morgan attends regular meetings with various teams about major works and service charges. He explains:
Many of our schemes are mixed tenure, so we have rented, leasehold and shared ownership properties. As part of their lease, the leaseholders contribute to the cost of major works, for example repairing roofs and windows. Once the works and costs have been decided between the Property Services team, Leasehold team and myself, we consult and discuss the works with the residents to try and manage their expectations, address their concerns and find a solution that works for everyone."
4:00pm: Recently, Morgan has been training our Housing Officers on our direct debit system. This is so they can view, amend, and set up new direct debits, which allows them to make any necessary amendments when reviewing accounts. Morgan collaborates with lots of different departments, which for him is what makes working in rent and service charges so interesting. He says:
Where I've worked previously it often felt like the Finance team was in its own bubble, so colleagues had this perception that Finance staff descend from upon high, tell people that their processes need improvement and then disappear. One of the things that drew me to Hastoe is that this isn't the case here, and across the Finance team we are driven to do the opposite. I get to work with every team in the organisation and help them to develop processes and solve problems - which in turn allows us to deliver a better service for our residents."
