Expense Specialist

Department: Marketing / Business OperationsReports to: Marketing Operations ManagerLocation: Dubai, UAE (regional remit across MEA)Type: Full-timeAbout UsAnker Innovations is a multinational consumer electronics company. Our consumer brands, including Anker, Nebula, eufy, and Soundcore, develop innovative products sold worldwide. Today we have over 5,000 employees across Asia, Europe, the Middle East, and the United States, and we are always looking for top talent to join our team.About This RoleRole SummaryThe Expense Specialist owns the end-to-end processing, validation, control and reporting of marketing expenses across the MEA region. The role sits at the intersection of Marketing and Finance: making sure every campaign, agency invoice and distributor claim is correctly scoped, documented, budgeted, reconciled and closed on time — and that the resulting spend data is clean enough to be trusted in performance and ROI reporting.This is a detail-heavy, cross-functional role. The person in it will be dealing daily with regional marketing leads, local distributors, external agencies and the finance team, often across several markets, currencies and approval workflows at once. Success depends as much on stakeholder management and persistence as on numerical accuracy.Key Responsibilities1. Expense & Claim Processing (approx. 35% of time)Process marketing expense submissions, distributor and dealer claims, agency invoices and internal reimbursements end-to-end: intake, validation, approval routing, payment follow-up and archiving.Validate supporting documentation against the originally approved activity scope before releasing any claim for approval. Typical evidence includes purchase orders, supplier invoices, signed activity briefs, execution photos, store-level branding proof, KOL post links and screenshots, media platform reports and event attendance records.Own recurring claim categories including store branding, KOL and influencer campaigns, dealer and channel events, in-store promoters, POSM production and installation, and channel marketing activities run through agency partners.Maintain a live claim status tracker segmented by market, brand, activity type and quarter, with clear colour-coded status (submitted / under review / pending documentation / approved / paid / rejected) and named owners for every open item.Proactively chase incomplete or unsupported submissions; escalate ageing items that risk missing a quarter cut-off.Apply and document rejection or partial-approval decisions with a clear written rationale that will hold up under audit.2. Budget Control & Reconciliation (approx. 30%)Track actual and committed spend against approved budgets by brand, market, channel and campaign; maintain a rolling view of budget consumption and remaining runway.Reconcile digital media spend pulled from platform reporting against platform invoices and internal records, investigating and resolving discrepancies before they reach reporting.Identify and correct common sources of variance — out-of-scope campaign types included in exports, date-range mismatches, currency conversion differences, platform credits and rebates, and VAT or withholding tax treatment.Standardize all reporting to a single agreed currency, using a consistent and documented FX methodology.Support month-end, quarter-end and year-end close: prepare accruals for activities delivered but not yet invoiced, review prepayments, clear open POs, and provide finance with a reconciled spend position by deadline.Flag budget risks and over-commitments to the Marketing Operations Manager early enough for corrective action.3. Compliance, Policy & Audit (approx. 15%)Apply company expense and procurement policy consistently across all markets, without exception for convenience or urgency.Identify non-compliant, duplicate, out-of-scope or insufficiently evidenced claims and manage those conversations professionally with the submitting party.Maintain complete, audit-ready records for every approved expense, stored in a consistent structure that a third party could navigate unaided.Support internal and external audit requests, statutory audits and any ad-hoc management review with prepared documentation trails.Ensure appropriate segregation of duties is respected in the approval chain and flag any breach.4. Reporting & Analysis (approx. 10%)Produce recurring spend reports for marketing and finance stakeholders — weekly claim status, monthly spend vs. budget, quarterly market-level summaries.Provide the clean, reconciled cost inputs used in campaign performance and ROI reporting.Surface spend patterns worth attention: cost inflation by activity type, markets consistently over or under budget, agencies with recurring documentation issues.Prepare ad-hoc analysis on request, for example historical cost benchmarking for a planned activity.5. Process Improvement & Stakeholder Support (approx. 10%)Act as the first point of contact for markets, agencies and distributors on expense-process questions.Identify recurring bottlenecks in the claims cycle and propose practical fixes — better submission templates, clearer documentation checklists, revised approval thresholds, automated status updates.Maintain and update the expense submission guidelines and onboard new markets, agencies or distributors onto the process.Contribute to the specification and testing of any new tooling or dashboards that touch spend data.RequirementsEssentialBachelor's degree in Finance, Accounting, Business Administration or a related field.2–4 years of experience in expense management, accounts payable, marketing operations, financial control or a comparable analytical/administrative role.Advanced Excel or Google Sheets: pivot tables, lookups, conditional logic, reconciliation of large multi-source datasets, clean report construction.Demonstrated attention to detail and a methodical, documented approach to record-keeping.Ability to manage a high volume of concurrent items with competing deadlines without losing track of any of them.Confidence to hold a line on policy with senior stakeholders while keeping the relationship intact.Professional written and spoken English.PreferredExperience in FMCG, consumer electronics or another distributor-led or channel-heavy business.Familiarity with ERP and expense systems such as SAP, Oracle, NetSuite, Concur or similar.Working understanding of how digital media platforms bill — Meta, Google Ads, Snapchat, programmatic — and where their reporting and invoicing typically diverge.Exposure to multi-currency environments and FX treatment in reporting.Familiarity with BI or dashboarding tools (Power BI, Looker Studio, Tableau).CompetenciesAccuracy under volume — maintains quality when the queue is long and the deadline is close.Constructive persistence — follows up until an item is closed, without creating friction.Commercial judgement — understands why a spend was made, not just whether the paperwork is complete.Clarity in writing — decisions and rationale are documented so anyone can follow them later.Ownership — treats an unresolved discrepancy as their problem until it is resolved or properly escalated.