Blackline Admin and Month End Closing Reporting Lead

Role Description: About Booking Holdings & Our India CoE At Booking Holdings, we help people experience the world, whether that’s reserving the perfect stay on Booking.com, discovering local flavors through OpenTable, or planning unforgettable trips with KAYAK or Agoda. As a global leader in travel and tech, we’re united by a mission to make it easier for everyone to explore, connect, and feel at home anywhere on the planet. Our India Centre of Excellence (CoE) in Bangalore is a fast-growing hub for innovation and collaboration across travel, fintech, and customer experience. Here, we build smarter systems, better processes, and meaningful solutions that touch millions of lives every day. Position overview This role plays a vital role in the Finance organization in ensuring the accurate and timely completion of the financial close process for our global company,acting as the coordinator between multiple Booking.com entities and verticals, including teams located in different regions. Furthermore, the role will play a critical role in process improvement in the whole R2R process. Responsibilities of the new role Financial close process management: - Manage the financial close process for the Booking.com entities including different business verticals and regions. - Ensure closing schedules and deadlines are met, and proactively address any potential issues or delays - Manage the month end close dependencies (internal accounting teams and external stakeholders) - Collaborate with cross functional teams to gather financial information and resolve discrepancies - Build and maintain relationship with stakeholders, ensuring coordination and effective (clear & timely) communication across - Run data analytics to validate the timeliness, accuracy and completeness of financial closing tasks - Oversee and coordinate the resolution of core SAP technical issues that arise during the month end close - Administer central closing tools such as Blackline and Sofy, including related business Sox controls, and access policies - Support the Senior Manager, Consolidation and Reporting on securing high quality reporting processes Month End Close process improvement: - Play a key role in the process improvement initiatives, driving operational excellence and optimizing financial processes - Partner with the Finance transformation team and help to identify inefficiencies, bottlenecks, areas for improvement and work with them and Financial Systems on projects to resolve core issues. - Promote best practices, encourage innovation and seek feedback from stakeholders to drive enhancements in the month end close process. - Foster a culture of continuous improvement and protagonist mindset within the accounting teams Cross team initiatives: - Lead process deep dives by analyzing account balances across entities to determine the process flows and related risks over the balance, and coordinate actions to review and assess the process and balance - Perform ongoing monitoring of open items and coordinate plans and actions across the teams to resolve and prevent accumulation of open aging transaction - Coordinate and manage the account reconciliation peer review process to ensure that quality gaps are identified and addressed - Perform value stream mapping to identify root cause process issues and corresponding actions required to improve process quality and efficiency - Drive accountability for delivering improvement actions across stakeholders in accounting teams, but also in other finance, functional and business teams - Where there are cross team improvement areas, maintain the planning and status of plans, validate actions completed and support escalation and management of items that are blocking progress Requirements - Strong accounting knowledge so as to be able to drive deep dives on financial processes. Accounting qualification strongly preferred. - Minimum 8+ years of experience - Experience managing continuous process improvement by defining, deploying and monitoring KPI improvements - Evidence of strong stakeholder management at all levels within the organization - Proactive and ready to manage difficult conversations, and ensure that issues are fixed at source. - 2- 3 years Project management experience preferred