Learning what the transaction count leaves out

My first accounts desk was in a processing office in Nagpur. I had completed a commerce degree at Hiravren College of Commerce in May 1995 and joined Varkelna Business Services that July. The company handled document preparation and account-query support for business customers. I entered expenses, checked supplier bills and helped reconcile the volumes used in client invoices. Those tasks taught me that a transaction count was not a neutral fact. Two teams could count the same work differently because one recorded receipt and the other recorded completion. Before asking whether a price was adequate, I needed to understand what that price actually bought.

I spent six years in that first appointment, gradually taking responsibility for a group of client accounts and coordinating two junior colleagues. I did not begin with a broad finance mandate or a professional authority I had not earned. My useful contribution was to find differences between operating records and billing schedules, then take them to the people able to resolve them. I learnt to preserve an unresolved item rather than clear it merely to make a month-end schedule look complete. A tidy ledger could still conceal a commercial question that nobody had answered.

In July 2001 I became a contract-costing manager. That role moved me closer to the conversations in which prices and service commitments were agreed. I worked with operating managers to estimate staffing, supervision, software and rework. A recurring difficulty was that the sales proposal described a normal transaction while the service team inherited a mixture of normal work and exceptions. We began separating those categories in bid reviews. I could calculate the consequence of a promise, but the commercial team still had to decide whether to offer it. Learning to challenge a bid without taking over the sale was an important part of the appointment.

I joined Mirelva Asset Services as financial controller in April 2008. Its work for financial institutions required a particularly clear distinction between our service revenue and the client records we helped administer. A large amount passing through a reconciliation process was not a large amount of our own business income. Nor did access to a client account statement give us access to the money in that account. I rebuilt reporting around the company's legal entities, contracts and bank accounts, while keeping client-operation measures available for the people who needed them. The separation made the reports less dramatic and more useful.

The head-of-finance appointment in April 2015 added planning, treasury administration and the relationship between contract margins and company cash. I led managers rather than trying to inspect every invoice myself. My concern was whether the review process brought a material disagreement to the right decision-maker in time. A client could dispute a service result while an account manager continued to describe the invoice as merely overdue. A software proposal could show an attractive accounting outcome while consuming cash before the expected operating benefit arrived. Those situations required a conversation across functions, supported by a financial record that did not pre-empt the answer.

In April 2021 I became CFO as employee shareholders acquired majority ownership. The change made capital allocation more personal for many colleagues. People who had helped build the business understandably wanted to see a return from ownership, as well as continued investment in its future. My responsibility was to present the capacity for a distribution without confusing aspiration, distributable earnings and cash available after obligations. An institutional investor took a minority position in 2023. I now lead 47 finance colleagues through four managers and report to the CEO, attending board and audit committee discussions by invitation.

At March 2026 the company employed 990 people in Nagpur, Nashik and Raipur and served eighteen financial institutions. Revenue for that financial year was ₹124 crore and profit before tax ₹8.6 crore. These figures describe a service business with substantial employment costs; they are not lending assets, deposits or assets under management. My cases concern the estimates and classifications that influence its decisions. They include a reduced view of billable volume, a correction to an internal cash dashboard and a service credit accepted before collection. I have kept the lost income, remaining receivable and timing limitations visible rather than presenting every correction as a financial success.

I am interested in bringing that discipline to a future board role in business services or financial infrastructure. My experience ends at presenting to directors; I have never held a statutory board appointment. Presenting a recommendation to a board has taught me something about the quality of evidence directors need, but it has not given me their experience of collective responsibility. I would begin with committee membership under an experienced chair, a defined induction and a realistic assessment of conflicts. The contribution I can support today is a habit of asking whether a reported amount describes the resource, obligation or activity that the decision actually depends on.

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