Get prepared for the end of the financial year

Mar 17 2023

If you have purchasing, finance or line management responsibilities, it’s time to get ready for the end of the 2022/23 financial year. Could you get ahead of the game to avoid the year-end rush? For example, are there any final invoices that could be sent out to customers now, are there any annual orders that can be closed down, or do you need to set up any substitutions so business can continue to run smoothly?

Keep on reading to find out how you and your manager can get prepared ahead of the financial year end.

What can I do for myself?

If you are planning on taking annual leave, make sure you have set up your substitutes so that business can continue smoothly in your absence. Further information on setting up substitutes is available on the Shared Services portal help pages just search, annual leave or substitutes in the search bar.

We recommend you register for a personal tax account with HMRC. Here you’ll be able to check and manage your tax code to ensure their records reflect your circumstances for the forthcoming tax year. We also have a tax code query tool to find the answers to the most common tax enquiries.

Check your own worklist on a regular basis and action any finance items you receive such as:

  • approving invoices for Service Shop purchase orders (POs). All Service PO invoices (CIS and non-CIS) must be reviewed before approval to ensure that the data entered on the VIM screen matches the data displayed on the invoice e.g., Invoice Reference, Supplier, Amounts
  • completing Goods Receipts to allow invoices for Simple Shop / eStore POs to be paid (you may also need to refer the work list item back to Shared Services once you have completed this)
  • confirming that a price blocked invoice can be paid
  • if you need a VAT only invoice or VAT journal to be processed before year end, send this to the tax team via ‘My Enquiry’ as early as possible

If you are expecting income, to minimise any unnecessary delays, e-mail the relevant shared in-box for your organisation in advance with the relevant details, including remittance advices.

For locally banked income received before 1 April, please ensure that your portal entries, and the physical banking of your cash and cheques, have been submitted prior to 1 April.

Make sure you submit any supplier requests through in a timely manner to ensure they can be set up and the supplier can register (where necessary) to avoid any potential issues with payments.

What can only my manager do?

Correcting leave quotas. If you think your annual leave quota is incorrect, speak with your manager in the first instance who can check your details by searching ‘my team’ on the Shared Services (IBC) portal.

Carrying forward leave. It is your line managers responsibility to create a carry forward leave quota for you once this has been agreed in line with your organisations’ policy. As an employee, you can check your quota has been created using the 'My Entitlements' section of the 'My Leave Requests' app. If your manager has carried your leave forward it will display as 'Carry Forward Leave - Hours'

IBC Portal Access. As a manager, you can check what IBC access your team members have by running the user assigned SAP security roles report. If you need to request IBC Portal Access, you will find the form in the ‘HR-Apps’ catalogue in the IBC Portal App finder. Don’t forget, any advanced access requests go through a two-step approval and will workflow to the relevant team in your organisation to be reviewed.

Further support

If you need any more information, check out the relevant guidance pages on the Shared Services (IBC) Portal.

If you have checked the guidance pages and you are still unsure you can launch a webchat within the guidance page to reach a specialist advisor, or you can launch webchat via the ‘contact us’ page. Raising a webchat will mean you get an instant response from one of the team in the Customer Support Centre who will help you resolve your issue, just look out for the orange icon.