Finance the rights and responsibilities that actually exist

As financial controller in 2018, I supported a ₹21 crore proposed programme for a privately contracted parking site. The investment model included ₹8 crore terminal land value at the end of the defined operating period. That assumption had come from an owned-property model. Contract controller Leena Zevqlathi challenged it because the proposed agreement gave our company an operating right, not ownership of the land or an entitlement to sell it. The value might exist for the owner without being available to us.

The commercial sponsor wanted to retain the assumption as an indication of the site’s long-term potential, suggesting that a future extension or ownership discussion could create value later. I agreed that future options could be explored. I disagreed that an unagreed route should support the dependable investment account. I withdrew the recommendation I had supported and asked for the proposal to be rebuilt from the rights and obligations actually established by the agreement under review.

Management authorised ₹47 lakh and eight weeks for financial and qualified contractual rework. The ₹8 crore land-realisation assumption was removed. Possible later arrangements were described separately as unresolved options, without assigning them a value that made the preferred case work. The ₹21 crore remained proposed investment pending a new decision; it was neither spent capital nor a claimed saving. Professional valuation, legal interpretation and reporting retained their own responsible owners.

The revised submission no longer relied on disposing of an asset our company did not own. It did not assert that land prices would fall or that the site had no commercial merit. The change gave up a favourable modelled benefit and delayed the proposal so the decision could be made on the actual operating business. My error was to let a familiar property template answer a question about a different contractual position. I wanted that acknowledged explicitly, because the relevant control was not merely checking the arithmetic. It was checking whether the company had the right to receive the value that the arithmetic had made persuasive.

A 2023 management model for a private parking-site agreement calculated the annual landowner payment by adding a ₹4.8 crore minimum to twenty percent of defined receipts. The agreement under review required the higher of those amounts. At ₹18 crore of modelled receipts, the variable calculation was ₹3.6 crore, so the payment was ₹4.8 crore rather than ₹8.4 crore. The model had represented a different commercial mechanism, even though both individual components had been copied correctly.

The investment team had already used the larger payment in comparing the site with another opportunity. Some colleagues wanted to preserve it as a conservative allowance because it made the proposal less likely to overpromise. I did not think an incorrect mechanism became sound merely because its effect was cautious in one scenario. Leena and the qualified contract owners confirmed the defined payment relationship before finance revised the scenario logic. Definitions of receipts and other contractual conditions remained part of that review.

We examined twelve planning scenarios: eight fell below the point where the variable payment exceeded the floor, and four exceeded it. At ₹30 crore of defined receipts, for example, twenty percent would be ₹6 crore, which replaced rather than supplemented the ₹4.8 crore floor. Management approved ₹38 lakh and seven weeks for the review, model correction and comparison rework. The agreement itself was not renegotiated, and the example did not involve recovering an actual overpayment.

The corrected model changed the investment comparison by applying the same mechanism consistently across the scenarios. It did not establish a realised profit uplift, saving or final site decision. I wanted the board to know why a previously unattractive comparison had changed and which assumption had been wrong. The trade-off was to reopen a discussion rather than quietly substitute the more favourable figure. A model’s usefulness depends on faithfully representing the arrangement, including when a correction improves the apparent case and therefore deserves as much scrutiny as an unfavourable revision.

A selected cash-planning account in 2025 showed ₹82 lakh after the other committed outgo included in that schedule. It was being used to support a proposed ₹60 lakh equipment commitment. Customers in the reviewed annual-pass cohort had already paid ₹1.2 crore in July for twelve months of service. By the end of December, six months of the service period remained. The forward schedule had omitted ₹42 lakh of forecast operating cost associated with serving that remaining period because the corresponding customer receipts were already in the past.

I asked finance and operating owners to reconnect the service work with the forward cash account. The remaining period was not a new cash receipt, and the ₹42 lakh was not a refund calculation or an asserted accounting liability. It was forecast expenditure within the selected planning basis. Including it reduced the ₹82 lakh balance to ₹40 lakh before any new equipment decision. The schedule did not describe the company’s entire liquidity, and other uncertainties still needed their own treatment.

The equipment sponsor preferred proceeding with the ₹60 lakh package, arguing that the prepaid customer relationship made future activity more predictable. Predictable activity still required resources to deliver it. I recommended phasing the proposal, and the responsible technical owners identified a ₹28 lakh initial scope that could be considered separately. Management approved that scope through its normal process, leaving ₹12 lakh within the reviewed account after the included service expense and the new commitment. The remaining equipment was deferred, not represented as purchased or unnecessary.

The review used ₹2.9 lakh and six weeks of work funded from the separate annual finance budget, outside this selected cash account. It did not prove a company-wide cash saving or establish that forecast costs would be exact. The decision made the timing of the customer receipt stop obscuring the work still owed. I accepted a smaller initial equipment programme because the useful question was what the business could fund after delivering its existing promise, not how much of an earlier receipt remained visible before that future service was included.