Chief Financial Officer / India
A decision should leave an intelligible account
- FY 2026 company revenue
- ₹218 Cr
- Licences ₹128 crore; maintenance ₹68 crore; implementation ₹22 crore
- Finance colleagues
- 26
- Four heads; ₹4.2 crore annual function expense
- Distribution partners
- 8
- Alongside direct sales across India
Decisions & consequences
01Deferring a distribution that the bank total could not support
A proposal to distribute ₹12 crore to shareholders began with a simple observation: Kulvani had ₹23 crore in bank balances. The parent wanted to plan its own cash commitments, and the Indian shareholders also welcomed a distribution. The total was correct, but ₹9 crore consisted of restricted performance-security deposits. Those balances could not be treated as available for the proposed payment. The first decision paper had not made that distinction sufficiently prominent.
I asked treasury to rebuild the proposal from usable cash. The opening amount was ₹14 crore. The ninety-day operating forecast included ₹8 crore of receipts and ₹18 crore of payments, leaving ₹4 crore before any distribution. Paying ₹12 crore would therefore create an ₹8 crore shortfall on that forecast, even before considering uncertainty in collection timing. The analysis concerned affordability; the legal and other requirements for a distribution still needed their own assessment and could not be inferred from this arithmetic.
The parent finance team asked whether the expected receipts could be accelerated or the restricted deposits released. We examined both possibilities and found no sufficiently supported route within the proposed period. I recommended deferring the full ₹12 crore proposal and revisiting it after receipts cleared and the forecast had been updated. The managing director supported the recommendation, and the board agreed. This delayed cash that shareholders had hoped to receive and required a different conversation within the parent group.
The decision did not add ₹12 crore to the business, reduce an expense or increase profit. It prevented a proposed use of cash from being treated as funded when it was not. We changed the format of later distribution papers so that restrictions, operating commitments and forecast uncertainty appeared before the recommendation. I also took responsibility for the earlier presentation: a fact can be included in supporting schedules yet still be effectively absent from the decision. Finance should make the relevant constraint understandable at the point where directors are being asked to act.
Declining the next credit extension without abandoning existing users
One of our eight distributors had ₹3.1 crore overdue within total channel receivables of ₹12.4 crore. It then brought a proposed ₹1.6 crore order that would require another ₹0.9 crore of credit from Kulvani. The channel team wanted to approve the extension, arguing that the new business would help preserve the relationship and support the distributor's recovery. I wanted evidence of how the earlier balance would be settled before adding another exposure.
The distributor provided forecasts but could not substantiate the near-term receipts needed for its plan. I recommended refusing incremental credit. The commercial head objected that the order could move elsewhere and that a firm stance might make collection harder. Those were plausible consequences. We discussed alternatives, including funded terms, but did not reach an arrangement the distributor could accept. It lost the proposed order. I recorded that lost opportunity without calling it a reversal of revenue we had already earned.
We kept the credit decision separate from our obligations to existing end customers. Licensed users continued receiving the support covered by their contracts; their service was not used as pressure to settle a dispute they did not control. The account team and finance agreed a collection plan with named follow-up responsibility. Over the following four months, ₹2.4 crore was received against the ₹3.1 crore overdue. The remaining ₹0.7 crore stayed visible and subject to further collection and accounting review.
I did not present the partial recovery as proof that the refusal alone caused payment, or describe the exposure as fully resolved. The useful outcome was that we avoided increasing an already doubtful commercial dependency while retaining a working route to collection. The case changed how we discuss exceptional credit: a new order must be examined for the exposure it adds, not used as a reason to forget the history already on the account. Finance also has to explain what remains payable and what would justify a future change in its position.
Challenging a parent allocation without denying shared value
The parent group's proposed service allocation to our India management budget was ₹11.4 crore. It combined identifiable technical support, common systems and broader group activities. Local managers wanted to challenge the whole amount because not every charge could be linked to an individual request from India. Group finance preferred the existing allocation basis because it was consistent across subsidiaries. Both positions were understandable, but neither explained the economic content of this particular proposal well enough.
I asked the teams to describe the activities, users and basis for inclusion rather than begin with a negotiation over the total. The review supported ₹6.8 crore of directly attributable services and ₹2.1 crore of shared support. The latter included capacity that benefited the business without producing a separate ticket for every use. I accepted that part of the proposal and explained why rejecting all shared cost would be no more credible than accepting every parent charge automatically.
The remaining ₹2.5 crore did not have a sufficiently supported basis for inclusion in the India management budget. After discussion with the managing director and group finance, the allocation was revised to ₹8.9 crore. This was a management-budget decision. Contractual, accounting and tax treatment followed their own review processes; I did not claim that our activity analysis established a transfer-pricing rule or settled a statutory question. Keeping those purposes separate made the discussion more accurate and less adversarial.
The trade-off was not simply a lower local expense figure. We accepted a meaningful shared-service cost and committed to revisiting the activity basis as usage changed. Group colleagues also had to explain costs that the previous method had distributed with less local scrutiny. The outcome gave both sides a more useful account of the services being funded. It taught me to challenge an allocation through the obligation and benefit it represents, rather than treating the parent relationship as either authority to accept a number or a reason to resist it on principle.
Supporting the team that stopped an urgent payment
A supplier payment of ₹78 lakh was due when a request arrived with changed bank details. The supporting correspondence looked familiar, and an operations manager wanted the payment released quickly to avoid disruption to an equipment-related delivery. Our payment team could not independently confirm the new destination through the established supplier contact. They held the payment and escalated the issue, knowing that a delay would be visible to senior management.
I supported the hold and asked the commercial team to manage the delivery consequence while verification continued. The supplier's established contact subsequently disavowed the change request. We did not use a contact route supplied in the disputed request as its own confirmation. The legitimate payment was released two days later using verified details. The delivery schedule required adjustment, and I made clear that finance had accepted that inconvenience as part of the decision rather than expecting operations to pretend it had no cost.
The available evidence did not establish who had sent the disputed instruction. Security and supplier-management colleagues handled their own investigation. My report to the executive team described an unconfirmed change, the verification result and the authorised payment, without presenting a speculative account of criminal identity. I also avoided claiming that a single successful interruption proved all payment risks were controlled. The event showed one point at which a check had worked and where pressure to bypass it had appeared.
We reviewed the separation between changing supplier records and releasing funds, the escalation route for urgent exceptions and the way managers respond when a team member pauses a payment. A control written into a procedure is fragile if the person applying it expects to be blamed for every delay. My contribution was to support the decision, make its commercial cost explicit and require the process review. The lesson was not that every unusual request is fraudulent. It was that urgency cannot supply the missing authority for a change in where the company's money is sent.