Lead - Accounts Receivable & Deductions

Company Overview

Since 1868, the Martinelli family has been producing award-winning apple juice. Located in the cool California Central Coast, the fertile Pajaro Valley produces the most flavorful apple varieties in the world. Since winning its first gold medal in 1890, Martinelli’s has received more than fifty gold medals for product excellence. Distribution of Martinelli’s Gold Medal products now extends to every state in the U.S. and globally.

Job Summary

The Lead - Accounts Receivable & Deductions (Lead – AR & Deductions), provides leadership to the AR-Deductions team, which is responsible for the efficient and accurate accounting, researching and processing of customer short payments, claims, deductions, and deduction-adjacent expenses. The Lead – AR & Deductions role oversees reporting, strategic AR-Deduction projects, such as process improvements and partnerships with external deduction support services, supporting technical system solutions, reconciling deduction ledgers and expense accounts, calculating deduction-related accruals, deduction journal entries, and providing overall expertise in deductions and deduction-related expenses. The Lead – AR Deductions interacts closely with our Sales, Order Entry, and Shipping teams to identify causes for customer fines deducted and helps develop action plans to reduce deductions. The Lead – AR & Deductions facilitates collaboration with the Accounts Receivable – Cash function of the Company to resolve customer deduction questions, aid in processing deductions, and providing relevant insights and context to AR-Deduction reporting.

Essential Job Functions

• Coordinate the accounts receivable deduction team workload, ensuring timely and accurate processing of deductions
• Be the technical expert for AR-Deduction obstacles
• Dynamically evaluate opportunities for simplification or enhancement of the processes owned by the AR-Deduction team
• Provide superior customer service to customers, brokers, and other Company employees
• Research and determine the root cause of deductions within a specified timeframe and work to reduce future occurrences by working closely with customers, brokers, sales managers and pricing coordinator
• Collaborate with customers, brokers, sales managers and/or log into customer websites/portals to obtain supporting documentation regarding deductions or claims
• Develop processes for summarizing deduction information with brokers, to facilitate efficient and accurate deduction processing
• Maintain Excel spreadsheets and files needed for each open deduction while analyzing information gathered through research and investigation
• Follow up with customer on repayment, if deduction dispute is not approved
• Enter transactions within relative accounting systems (e.g. SAP, BluePlanner, etc.) for timely and accurate deductions reporting
• Process deduction transactions within the deduction management system and ensure reconciliation between SAP and the deduction management system, BluePlanner, is completed
• Proactively identify trends and assist in implementing process improvement to prevent invalid deductions
• Reconciles and confirms accurate integration between the system of record (SAP) and deduction processing system (BluePlanner); including processing corrections where needed
• Analyzes deductions and related expenses, e.g. promotions and various customer fees that are received via deduction
• Prepares journal entries for close, such as outstanding deduction accrual estimates
• Proactively communicate challenges and resolves delays in sourcing data to keep completion of tasks timely
• Support the annual audit process by creating and sourcing auditor requested information
• Escalate any unresolved deductions with regional sales managers and or brokers assignments
• Lead internal meetings with the Sales department to review deduction related expenses and unprocessed deduction balances
• Perform tasks, analysis, special projects, and other duties as directed by the finance management
• Prepare ad hoc AR-Deduction reporting
• Assist other departments as appropriate with financial requests
• Train other staff on various AR-Deduction functions

Job Qualifications

• Three years of experience in accounts receivable, with an emphasis in deduction processing, and increasing responsibilities required
• Two years of experience with SAP or other full-scale enterprise resource management software in a high-volume sales environment
• Two years of experience with BluePlanner or other full-scale deduction processing software in a high-volume sales environment
• Business, finance, or accounting associate degree, or equivalent accounting certifications

Preferred Skills (not required)

• Experience in food manufacturing or agricultural goods processing industry
• Experience with decision-support systems including Domo, Adaptive Insights and BluePlanner

Knowledge, Skills, and Ability

• Professional curiosity and ability to self-investigate and resolve variances, technical impediments, and other challenges
• Ability to prepare, interpret and communicate information verbally and with digital tools including spreadsheets and business intelligence applications to financial and non-financial parties
• Ability to follow-through tasks to resolution, self-resolving variances to the extent possible, while timely communicating with management when obstacles prevent a task from being completed without support
• Be a team player with strong interpersonal and communication skills including strong internal drive, ethics, conscientiousness, diplomacy, flexibility, and dependability
• Ability to work in a fast-paced environment, to prioritize tasks, meet multiple deadlines and ensure that work is accomplished in the time frames required
• Strong analytic and problem-solving skills
• Ability to respect confidential matters by exercising individual discretion
• Strong Microsoft Office skills including Outlook and Excel (Pivot Tables, Index/Match, and similar efficiency tools)
• Ability to clearly communicate financial activity to non-financial parties
• Strong arithmetic skills
• Excellent verbal, written and interpersonal communication skills
• Strong understanding of the AR-Deductions process
• Strategic knowledge of how AR-Deductions impacts other areas of the company’s financial activity
• Ability to type by touch at 55 words per minute
• Ability to ten-key by touch at 10,000 keystroke per hour
• Strong attention to detail
• Ability to work cross-functionally with various team members across the company

Physical Demands and Working Environment

The physical demands described here are representative of those that must be met by an employee to successfully perform the essential functions of the job. Reasonable accommodations may be made to enable individuals with disabilities to perform the essential functions

• Pass a background and credit check, and drug screen
• Ability to stand and/or sit for long periods of time and periodically lift up to 25 pounds
• Ability to stand and/or sit in front of a computer screen for extended periods of time
• Ability to commute to the office as needed
• Work is performed in a standard office environment

All Employees Are Expected To

• Comply with all Company safety requirements
• Adhere to all Company policies and procedures

Benefits

Upon meeting eligibility requirements, the Company offers the following: health insurance coverage, LTD, 401(k) profit share contributions, paid sick leave, paid vacation leave, and eight (8) paid holidays per year. Eligible employees may also make 401(k) elective deferral contributions and may elect a co-pay plan for health insurance coverage for eligible dependents.

Disclaimer

This job description is only a summary of the typical functions of the job, not an exhaustive or comprehensive list of all possible job responsibilities, tasks, and other duties as assigned.

Equal Employment Opportunity Statement

S. Martinelli & Company is an Equal Opportunity Employer (EOE). All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, religion, national origin, marital status, age, disability, veteran status, genetic information, or any other protected status.

Pay range: $33.00/ hr. to $38.00/hr.