Job Purpose

We are looking for a highly self-motivated and detail-oriented Credit Manager to join our Credit team reporting hierarchically to the Credit, collections & Trade finance Team Leader Africa Middle East. The Credit Manager is responsible to support the financial goals of Bridgestone South Africa and its sales efforts, while maintaining healthy account receivables within the risk requirements of the organization.

The Credit Manager works closely with team members and management to monitor and ensure compliance with credit management laws and policies. This person must be able to initiate, maintain and grow solid relationships with supply chain, sales, and finance teams to assess existing processes and procedures for improvement opportunities related to account management based on company’s cash flow requirements and risk appetite.

Responsibilities:

• Manages the activities of credit approval and collections, applies policies and maintains supporting processes and procedures
• Lead, direct, evaluate, and develop a team of credit and collections staff to ensure that the credit and collections activities are conducted effectively and ethically and comply with the organization’s policies and standards as well as relevant regulations and laws
• Monitors and reports customer credit risk, recommends credit exposure limits and facilitates special credit arrangements and problem collection accounts
• Negotiates collateral and security arrangements where needed
• Supports collection procedures and fields collection escalations by visiting key clients
• Identifies target accounting to focus on improving payment habits while increasing sales through security transactions
• Manage and prepare dashboards to monitor key performance indicators
• Supervise approval of credit applications
• Secure all necessary procedures required to execute financial instruments including credit insurance, guarantees, LCs and SBLCs 
• Prepare monthly accounts and customer aging reports for the finance department
• Respond to inquiries from customers, and research/resolve outstanding credit issues
• Assist in developing new credit policies and procedures
• Maintain credit invoice and supporting documentation files
• Review A/R ledger and initiate steps to resolve aged invoices/accounts and customer disputes as required
• Perform analytical review and reporting within accounts receivable
• Liaise with functional or operational area managers (for example in sales or customer service) to ensure that credit and collection activities are consistent with the organization’s overall customer relations strategy
• Analyse and evaluate the credit worthy of our customers, analysis of financial statements, contacts with our credit insurer
• Establish and monitor credit limits
• Active collection of outstanding invoices by phone, e-mail, or other means (e.g. automated dunning procedures)
• Continuously working on the DSO
• Follow-up the whole credit limit process; releasing the orders, blocking the customers, updating credit limits.
• Deciding on block shipments in consultation with the Credit / Finance manager.
• Minimize bad debt exposure
• Close cooperation with our internal stakeholders
• Report generating, writing, and compiling
• Reconciliation of Vendor Statements

Qualifications & Experience Required

Education, Master, other certification:

• Bachelor’s degree in accounting, Finance, Business or related field
•  

Experience (years):

• Minimum of 5 years of prior supervisory or management experience
• 7 years of progressive credit experience in a sales or similar environment

Technical Skills:

• Experience in financials instruments is a plus
• SAP experience
• Strong Excel and PowerPoint skills
• Advanced Financial Statement analysis
• Proficient in PC skills, accounting software, Internet-based programs, MS Office Suite, especially Excel experience with credit rating tools

Languages Skills:

• English

Soft/Behavioral Skills:

• The ideal candidate has excellent verbal and written communications skills, is also dependable and accountable
• Ability to communicate with all levels within the organization, customers, and vendors
• Ability to maintain accuracy in a very detailed work environment, highly detail oriented