Interim Regional Finance and Capital Director — Forecast Ownership

Why a forecast needs an owner rather than a template

Forecasts drift when they belong to the finance function instead of the people who run the business. Central finance builds the number, the business units disown it, and every variance meeting becomes a debate about whose assumptions were wrong. The cure is not a better spreadsheet. It is a clear answer to a simple question: who stands behind this figure, and who explains it when it moves?

Putting that answer in place is this interim director's job, and for 12 months the director decides rather than recommends, with the Group Chief Financial Officer as the line above. Where forecasting and spending limits rest, with business-unit leaders or with the region, is the director's call, as is the choice of measures for governing investment and capacity. Inherited commitments are reviewed and either kept, suspended or closed. A proposal that would leave a business unit holding cost or risk it never signed for is halted, and value cases that cannot say who adopts the change, what other work it leans on, or what a miss would cost are declined. The director also signs off the shape of the finance leadership team and the way open questions travel upward, so that the business units can act without routing every exception through the centre.

Across venture-backed technology there is a standing temptation to treat the forecast as a fundraising narrative. A good finance director resists it: a forecast earns its keep only when the operators believe it as much as the investors do.

Twelve months from a central estimate to unit accountability

The first ninety days are about names and a calendar. Every business unit should have a forecast owner, the units should share one forecasting timetable, and the variance thresholds that trigger an explanation should be agreed and understood. None of this is glamorous, and all of it is required before anything else works.

Around month nine the test is behavioural. Forecasts should arrive on one cycle, and when they miss, the explanation should come from the business-unit owner rather than from a finance analyst reconstructing someone else's logic. Central finance moves from authoring the number to challenging it.

By month 12 forecast accountability should be written into the way decisions are allocated across the region, with a successor in place who can hold the standard once the interim term closes. A strong outcome is that nobody can remember who used to write the forecast for them.

The finance leader who can hand the pen back

Your finance leadership should have covered a business with revenue of $945 million or above, a headcount of 2,100 or more and operations in four countries. Your experience should include value creation, succession and professionalisation, ideally in settings where finance had to grow up quickly. Because a forecast is ultimately a claim on capital, capital allocation matters most, at level 4. FP&A forecasting at level 3 is the obvious companion, and controls reporting and risk judgement, both at level 3, keep owned forecasts honest.

You have refused to let an exception run on until someone accepted its cost. You will count closing a weak commitment early as a real result, and you can back that view with evidence. When a forecast misses for reasons nobody yet understands, you tell the Group Chief Financial Officer exactly that, along with what you are doing to find out. And you would rather be measured on the year's result than consulted on it.

Finance chief, audit chair, executives, board

Week 1 opens confidentially, by video, with the Group Chief Financial Officer, and covers the mandate and your view of who should own each forecast. Two weeks on, in week 3, you sit down with the Audit Committee Chair to work through how forecast variances and controls connect. In week 5 you sit in person with a panel of executives, one from each major function, who will test whether your model survives contact with the business units. The process ends in week 7, when the full board meets you. Each stage gets a response from us, in writing, within three working days.