Chief Financial Officer / India
The omitted obligation changed what could be committed
- Finance colleagues
- 21
- Three heads; company employment totals 180
- Annual finance-function expense
- ₹3.2 crore
- Separate from company investment and treasury authority
- Career since June 1995
- 31 years
- Leasing accounts through energy-services CFO
Decisions & consequences
012019: the omitted charge that changed the expansion recommendation
As financial controller I supported a forecast for twenty-eight charging sites that showed ₹18.6 crore annual revenue. The model included ₹11.4 crore energy cost, ₹3.8 crore lease and network costs and ₹1.7 crore maintenance. Those categories totalled ₹16.9 crore, leaving an apparent ₹1.7 crore contribution before central overhead, finance and tax. The positive figure was entering a recommendation for a further fourteen sites with a proposed ₹22 crore investment.
A review of the actual site agreements identified another ₹2.2 crore of demand-related electricity charges that the forecast had omitted. Total identified costs therefore became ₹19.1 crore and the contribution became a ₹0.5 crore deficit. These were the invented agreements in this case, not a claim that every charging site has the same tariff structure. The error was mine to address because I had supported the model’s use in the recommendation. I withdrew that forecast and asked the investment decision to wait.
Management authorised ₹36 lakh and eight weeks for finance and operating colleagues to reconstruct the site-cost account with the relevant contractual input. We kept the corrected contribution distinct from a full profit measure, since central overhead, finance and tax remained outside it. We also retained uncertainty about future utilisation rather than replace the missing cost with an optimistic revenue assumption. The fourteen-site proposal was deferred; the uncommitted ₹22 crore was not described as recovered cash or a saving already earned.
The result was a different decision sequence. The board would receive a revised operating argument before considering expansion, rather than approve the investment on the earlier contribution headline. The correction did not establish that charging ownership was universally unattractive or that all existing sites should close. It established that this particular recommendation lacked a complete cost basis. I changed my review practice so the cost categories and exclusions appeared beside the contribution figure, making it harder for a convenient subtotal to acquire more authority than its evidence justified.
2023: funding supplier payments without spending a restricted reserve
A six-week payment review began with ₹42 crore in bank balances and ₹26 crore of supplier obligations falling due over the period. Read as two totals, the position appeared comfortable. The financing arrangements, however, restricted ₹18 crore as a debt-service reserve. That left ₹24 crore unrestricted. Management also required ₹8 crore operating cash headroom, so the amount available for the supplier programme without breaching that headroom was ₹16 crore. The planned payments therefore had a ₹10 crore funding gap.
I took the distinction to CEO Arman Qerzvami with treasury and legal input. The restricted amount was not described as permanently unusable under every possible future agreement; the point was that the current payment plan could not assume permission to redirect it. Nor was the ₹8 crore operating headroom a contractual reserve of the same kind. It was a separately stated management requirement. Keeping the two constraints distinct made the proposed funding decision easier to examine.
The authorised response was a facility with a ₹12 crore limit, from which ₹10 crore was drawn after the responsible teams verified the conditions and completed the necessary approvals. The remaining ₹2 crore of facility headroom was not counted as cash already held. The supplier schedule could then be funded while preserving the stated operating headroom and leaving the ₹18 crore restricted balance intact. No claim was made that the facility eliminated financing risk or that borrowing was automatically preferable in another company’s circumstances.
The leadership work was to turn an apparently sufficient balance into an accurate account of permission and timing, then obtain an authorised response to the identified gap. I asked controller Seema Vaqzerli to keep the restricted balance, available balance, operating requirement and facility position separately visible in subsequent planning. The outcome was a funded schedule under the reviewed conditions, not an assertion that the whole ₹42 crore had been freely available all along. A treasury number should support the commitment being made at that moment.
2025: keeping site restoration in the account after operations end
A review of thirty-six leased charging locations asked what the company would need to fund when the relevant arrangements ended. Engineering and property colleagues, with legal review, established a planning scope for thirty-four leases. Two remained unresolved because the responsibility and scope still required clarification. I rejected a presentation that placed those two at zero merely to complete the schedule. An unknown obligation could not be made absent by an empty estimate.
The thirty-four understood cases carried an invented planning estimate of ₹7.2 crore. Eight nearer-term sites accounted for ₹2.4 crore and twenty-six later sites for ₹4.8 crore. These were planning amounts under the reviewed assumptions, not a professional valuation for every future condition. Management authorised ₹48 lakh and ten weeks for the coordinated review. The board then approved a near-term cash allocation of ₹0.8 crore annually over three years, totalling ₹2.4 crore for the eight sites.
That cash plan did not cover the remaining ₹4.8 crore on the later twenty-six sites, whose funding required separate planning. It also did not resolve the two unclear leases. We carried both matters forward explicitly. Qualified accounting advisers and the responsible finance owners separately examined applicable recognition, measurement and timing requirements. The cash allocation was not presented as permission to defer an accounting liability, and the planning estimate was not casually labelled as the booked provision.
The decision changed how the company discussed the end of an operating site. The financial account now included an identified near-term funding plan, a later requirement still to be funded and two unresolved responsibilities. It did not claim that restoration work had already been completed or that the estimates would remain unchanged. My contribution was to keep those different states visible together. Expansion discussions should recognise that a leased location can carry obligations beyond the period in which its charging revenue appears in the operating plan.