PACE Buyer - Buyers Desk

Aquent is partnering with a leading global company at the forefront of its industry to find a highly motivated and detail-oriented individual to join their central procurement team. This is an exciting opportunity to make a tangible impact by ensuring seamless financial operations and empowering business teams to achieve their goals without procurement hurdles. Your expertise will be crucial in maintaining data accuracy, compliance, and resolving critical issues across diverse systems and stakeholders, directly contributing to the efficiency and financial health of a dynamic organization.

About the Role

As a key member of the Buyers Desk, you will be instrumental in the end-to-end execution of purchases across the full Procure-to-Pay lifecycle. This centralized procurement function handles everything from initial intake to purchase order creation, vendor coordination, and invoice readiness, allowing business teams to focus on their core objectives. Your role extends beyond simple PO creation; you will collaborate directly with vendors, finance partners, accounts payable, sourcing, and business stakeholders to ensure every purchase is correctly structured, compliant, and optimized for smooth invoicing and payment processes. You will be the linchpin connecting systems, people, and vendors, ensuring that procurement execution works flawlessly in practice.

What You'll Do

• Review and prioritize incoming purchase requests, accurately creating requisitions on behalf of business requesters.
• Map requests to appropriate commodity codes to ensure correct general ledger alignment and prevent downstream financial discrepancies.
• Validate cost center and project code assignments before submission to avoid approval delays and maintain budget integrity.
• Determine service start and end dates from contracts or statements of work and apply correct prepaid treatment when applicable.
• Manage purchase order amendments, renewals, monthly netting activities, and closures across your assigned portfolio.
• Confirm budget availability and project code assignments with finance partners before submitting requisitions.
• Collaborate on month-end accrual reviews, validating prepaid flags, service periods, and purchase order structures against expected invoices.
• Identify and proactively resolve coding issues (cost center, GL, project) to prevent rework and ensure financial accuracy.
• Coordinate directly with vendors on purchase order setup, payment terms, and invoicing requirements to ensure invoices match and process smoothly.
• Support vendor onboarding through the Vendor Assessment Process (VAP) and confirm completion prior to raising purchase requisitions.
• Follow up on missing goods receipts, which are essential for timely invoice payment.
• Serve as the primary point of contact for business requesters from initial intake through purchase order issuance.
• Proactively follow up on missing information or incomplete requests to meet service level agreements (SLAs).
• Provide a seamless experience for requesters, abstracting the complexities of procurement systems.
• Assess each request for compliance requirements, including after-the-fact purchases, emergency exceptions, and blanket purchase order scenarios.
• Confirm vendor assessment workflow completion at required thresholds.
• Apply regional requirements such as tax treatment, entity-specific rules, and restricted currencies.
• Escalate repeat non-compliant behaviors and exceptions with clear documentation.
• Coordinate with Sourcing teams where required and support purchase order setup post-contract execution.

What You'll Bring

Must-Have Qualifications:

• 2+ years of experience in procurement operations or procure-to-pay execution, with hands-on purchase order creation and queue management.
• Working knowledge of how general ledger accounts, cost centers, project codes, and payment terms connect.
• Experience with a comparable P2P platform.
• Proven ability to manage a queue of requests at different stages while consistently meeting response SLAs.
• Strong cross-functional communication skills, capable of effectively interacting with Finance, Accounts Payable, Legal, and various business stakeholders.
• High attention to detail across data inputs (commodity codes, entity, currency, coding) before submission.
• Experience working in a global or multi-entity environment where regional requirements impact purchase order structure.

Nice-to-Have Qualifications:

• Direct experience with Coupa.

About Skill:

Skill connects the best professional, IT, engineering, financial and administrative talent with the world's biggest brands. Our eligible talent get access to benefits such as health benefit contributions, retirement plans with match and flexible spending accounts.

Skill is an equal-opportunity employer. We evaluate qualified applicants without regard to age, race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, veteran status, and other legally protected characteristics. We're about creating an inclusive environment-one where different backgrounds, experiences, and perspectives are valued, and everyone can contribute, grow their careers, and thrive.

#LI-SJ1