Chief Financial Officer / India
Correct the account before the decision depends on it
- Company employees
- 190
- March 2026; twelve finance colleagues through two heads
- Company revenue
- ₹92 crore
- FY 2025–26; ₹7.1 crore operating profit
- Finance experience
- 30 years
- Accounts preparation, plant finance, control and CFO responsibility
Decisions & consequences
01Replacing an equal average with the contribution the portfolio actually earned
A 2022 pricing and mix review used a selected ₹1 crore sales portfolio containing two product lines. One represented ₹90 lakh sales with a twenty per cent contribution after agreed variable costs. The other represented ₹10 lakh sales with a fifty per cent contribution on the same defined basis. The executive summary showed thirty-five per cent by averaging the two rates equally. That would have implied ₹35 lakh contribution, while the actual weighted calculation was ₹18 lakh plus ₹5 lakh, or ₹23 lakh.
The commercial team had begun using the higher figure to support a proposed mix recommendation. Finance had reviewed the summary without requiring the sales weights and rupee contributions to sit beside it. I stopped the paper before pricing approval and told the CEO that the error belonged to our review process as well as the spreadsheet. The ₹12 lakh difference was an overstatement in the selected analysis, not a realised company loss or a change to the full year's operating profit.
One response was to remove the combined rate and leave only separate product percentages. I considered that incomplete because directors still needed an aggregate view to compare the alternatives. We retained the portfolio account with explicit weights, the agreed variable-cost boundary and the resulting rupee contribution. Commercial colleagues then reconsidered the mix using the corrected basis and the demand assumptions behind each line. The analysis did not turn the higher-rate product into an automatic priority irrespective of its available sales or production requirements.
The five-week review cost ₹18 lakh in finance analysis, commercial reworking and additional supervisory time. No new pricing commitment had been approved from the withdrawn paper. The revised recommendation reached the executive team with twenty-three per cent contribution and a clear distinction from operating profit, which also depends on costs outside that calculation.
I accepted the embarrassment of correcting a finance-approved headline because leaving a persuasive figure unexplained would create a larger trust problem. The lesson was not simply to use a different spreadsheet formula. It was to put the economic basis where the decision-maker could examine it, and to make the CFO responsible for correcting a summary that had passed through the function's own controls.
Withdrawing a cash-saving claim created by a larger production divisor
A 2024 production plan spread ₹60 lakh annual fixed expense over sixty thousand comparable units, giving ₹100 per unit. A growth scenario used a hundred thousand units and showed ₹60 per unit with the same annual expense. A presentation then multiplied the ₹40 reduction by the original sixty thousand units and described ₹24 lakh as a saving available to support the expansion proposal. The calculation had changed its production basis between steps without identifying any expense that would disappear.
Operations wanted recognition for making better use of the plant, and the commercial forecast suggested more demand. Both were legitimate matters to assess. I separated them from the claimed cash benefit. The higher-volume scenario could improve fixed-cost absorption in a management analysis, but it did not reduce the ₹60 lakh annual expense merely by changing the divisor. Nor was the forecast volume an achieved result or a committed customer requirement.
I worked with operations head Kavita Pelnashi to restate the proposal using the unchanged annual fixed amount, the two volume assumptions and the variable costs appropriate to each scenario. The paper also identified any actual expenditure change separately, with evidence and timing. We removed the ₹24 lakh cash-saving claim. This was a correction to an internal planning comparison, not an instruction to change statutory inventory accounting or a claim that additional production had no economic value.
The revised paper took six weeks and ₹14 lakh of planning and finance effort. The CEO deferred the expansion approval pending demand evidence and the revised total economics. We reported that decision as a deferral, without claiming an investment return or a saving that had already been realised. The operating team retained responsibility for whether the proposed volume could be produced at the required quality and configuration.
The case taught me to challenge an attractive benefit without dismissing the colleague's underlying objective. More output from an existing expense base may be worthwhile. It should compete for approval on its actual consequences, including the resources and demand needed, rather than on a cash release that exists only because two different denominators have been combined.
Showing a forty-per-cent group dependence behind a twenty-per-cent customer
The FY 2025–26 customer review identified the largest individual account as ₹18.4 crore, twenty per cent of Tevlaqni's ₹92 crore revenue. Two other legal customers generated ₹11.04 crore and ₹7.36 crore. All three shared a parent. Their combined ₹36.8 crore represented forty per cent of company revenue, a materially different view of dependence from the largest-account statement. At the same review date their open receivables were ₹4.2 crore, ₹2.1 crore and ₹1.7 crore, totalling ₹8 crore.
The collection team correctly maintained separate debtor accounts, contracts and due dates. The problem was that management had relied on that legal-account view as if it also described independent economic relationships. I added a parent-group exposure view while retaining the individual accounts. Common ownership did not establish an obligation to settle another customer account, combine the buyers' payment obligations or prove that one customer's difficulty would automatically become another's default.
The commercial head was concerned that highlighting forty per cent would be read as a collection failure and damage a productive relationship. I explained that the review had not established a default. It identified dependence that deserved explicit consideration before we approved additional exposure. The CEO asked for a group-level discussion of proposed new business, alongside the existing debtor-specific credit process. Current contractual commitments were not cancelled or retrospectively rewritten.
The eight-week exercise cost ₹11 lakh in customer-record verification, finance work and management review. The board received both views, including the ₹8 crore receivable snapshot and its date. Any new exposure above the agreed management review point required an additional decision. I did not present the exercise as eliminating concentration or reducing the reported receivables simply by regrouping them.
The outcome was a more complete basis for credit and strategy choices. Separate customers remained separate legal counterparties, while the shared parent became visible in the account of economic dependence. I learned to preserve the purpose of the existing record when adding another view. Finance should not replace one accurate but limited description with a different description that overclaims what the relationship proves.