What an unexplained receipt taught me

The first reconciliation I remember clearly was not especially large. A supplier had received money from a customer, but the remittance covered several invoices and a deduction that nobody in our accounts team could explain. I had treated the bank receipt as the end of the task. My supervisor asked me to show which balance would remain after the allocation. I could not. That distinction between money arriving and a transaction being understood has stayed with me through a career in receivables finance.

I graduated from Kazeharune Commercial College in March 1994 and joined Shionagiri Receivables Finance the following month as an accounts assistant. The business was much smaller then, with 48 employees and roughly ¥6 billion of financed receivables. I worked on supplier statements, payment references and routine reconciliations. I had no lending mandate. My responsibility was to prepare an accurate record for people who did, and to make uncertainties visible rather than balance an account through a convenient assumption.

In 2000 I moved into funding operations. That brought me closer to the documents and calculations used to draw on our facilities. I learnt that a commercially sensible transaction could still fall outside the agreement supporting a particular funding line. The response was not to declare the transaction unworthy or assume that a lender would overlook the difference. We needed either another source of capacity, better evidence or a revised customer commitment. I became comfortable explaining those alternatives to colleagues whose main concern was completing the seller's request that day.

My promotion to funding operations manager in 2007 added responsibility for nine people and the daily preparation of availability reports. I inherited a team with deep knowledge of individual customers but uneven documentation of its exceptions. We made those exceptions easier to hand over, especially when an experienced colleague was absent. Some employees worried that documenting their judgement would turn it into a rigid checklist. They were right to resist that outcome. I wanted a successor to understand the question being considered, not simply reproduce the last person's answer.

The move to financial controller in 2013 was a deliberate broadening of my experience. I took responsibility for month-end reporting, the expense plan and the quality of management information. I had to learn to work through the accountants who understood reporting requirements better than I did, while bringing a funding perspective to their explanations. We separated movements caused by new advances, collections, adjustments and timing differences. A net portfolio movement could then be discussed without treating every component as evidence of the same commercial trend.

I became CFO in January 2020. The appointment placed treasury and funding operations alongside financial control under my remit, while credit and seller relationship management stayed elsewhere. That structure requires disagreement to be handled openly. A relationship director can be right that a supplier is valuable to us, and the treasurer can be right that a proposed advance leaves too little room for delayed collections. My role is to show the conditions under which both concerns can be addressed, or to explain why we cannot responsibly make the commitment being requested.

One of my more uncomfortable decisions involved an acquisition we had already spent months examining. The commercial case assumed a large transfer of customer relationships. Our ledger review found that several sellers' deduction practices were poorly described, making the usable funding perimeter narrower than the headline receivables balance suggested. I supported a smaller transaction. We lost projected income and some negotiating goodwill, but acquired a business we could explain to our funding partners without relying on an immediate improvement in records that had not yet occurred.

I am cautious about presenting a long tenure as proof of broad experience. I have worked through five substantially different appointments, but all have been within one specialist financier. I know our market and operating model well; I have not run a universal bank, led an international treasury or served as an independent director. Those limits belong beside my accomplishments. They also inform the next step I would consider: a board where my knowledge of receivables, cash timing and financial evidence fills a real gap, and where colleagues can challenge the habits I have acquired in one organisation.

Outside formal presentations, I spend time with the people resolving old unmatched items. Their work reveals whether a new reporting distinction is useful or merely produces another category to maintain. I still ask to see a transaction that does not fit the standard explanation. A finance function should be able to admit that the record is incomplete without losing its ability to make a timely, proportionate decision. That is the professional standard I try to make practical for my team.

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