Kenneth Lai
Auckland
Summary
Dynamic, effective, and meticulous accounting professional with extensive experience within a global corporate environment. Proven ability to improve financial processes and leverage IT systems to meet strategic goals and seamless day to day business operations.
Overview
9
9
years of professional experience
Work History
Finance Manager
Navico Group APAC Ltd
12.2021 - 05.2025
- Responsibility and stewardship over company financial data. Streamlined monthly/annual financial close process, reducing time spent on manual tasks and improving data accuracy and timely entries to meet tight deadlines.
- Forecasting and presenting month end variances to the leadership team and managers across other departments, highlighting risks and providing mitigating recommendations.
- Coordinating and managing stock take processes for $15m of inventory across 4000 SKU's of finished goods and raw materials. Analysing system and real time count data for variances achieving 100% accuracy on audit sampling.
- Full end to end responsibility and contact with external auditors and tax advisory for statutory requirements - Annual Financial Statements, GST, FBT, PAYE & Tax.
- Simplifying processes for data extract and reporting for management of inventory, manufacturing and market operations. Automating existing and creating new reports to bring raw ERP data to easily manageable formats and digestible dashboards.
- Successful direct report management - guiding an underperforming employee to a valued member for the team through relationship building, mentorship and training in actionable steps with intentional use of KPI's.
- Running the company's annual standard costing process, requiring both cross departmental and inter-company collaboration and cost analysis to revalue inventory.
Accountant
Navico Group APAC Ltd
09.2016 - 12.2021
- Gained extensive GL experience through month end reconciliations, day to day accounting and auditor walk throughs in external audits.
- Managed payroll for 80 staff including leave and bonus calculations across 10 departments.
- Simplified reconciliation processes and digitalising all physical work flows.
- Implementing and rolling out enterprise expense management.
Education
Bachelor of Commerce (BCom) - Accounting
University of Auckland
Provisional Chartered Accountants ANZ Member - undefined
Chartered Accountants Australia and New Zealand
Skills
- Financial analysis
- Management accounting
- Financial reporting
- Forecasting
- Advanced Excel
- Process simplification
- Oracle ERP / EPM / Smartview
- Power BI
- Standard costing
- IT Systems
- Effective communicator
- Internal controls
Languages
English
Cantonese
Mandarin
Timeline
Finance Manager
Navico Group APAC Ltd
12.2021 - 05.2025
Accountant
Navico Group APAC Ltd
09.2016 - 12.2021
Provisional Chartered Accountants ANZ Member - undefined
Chartered Accountants Australia and New Zealand
Bachelor of Commerce (BCom) - Accounting
University of Auckland