Vice President Finance Controls — Energy Marketing Reporting and Commercial Assurance

The mandate

An energy-distribution group is creating a vice-president role to bring reporting integrity and commercial control design into one accountable finance perimeter. Acquired entities have retained different transaction cut-offs, adjustment practices and exception thresholds, making consolidated performance difficult to interpret. The appointment is open-ended, with an initial eighteen-month programme to establish a common control and reporting architecture. The aim is not a larger compliance manual; it is reliable evidence at the points where stock, delivery, customer terms and accounting records can diverge.

You will start with the events that create material judgement: product movements between locations, unsettled customer adjustments, supplier claims and manual changes to commercial accruals. Each needs an accountable owner, a reproducible accounting treatment and an escalation route proportionate to its risk. Management reporting must explain when a regional result reflects operating performance and when it reflects unresolved treatment or cut-off differences. Controls should be designed around the evidence actually available at terminals and commercial offices, rather than ideal records nobody can produce on schedule.

The VP leads thirty-one controllers and specialists through entity finance heads. You set reporting policies within approved accounting positions, determine finance-control testing priorities and require remediation owners for material deficiencies. Entity executives remain responsible for business execution; internal audit retains independent assurance. The CFO approves significant policy changes, and the audit committee considers unresolved material risk. You may stop publication of a management result lacking agreed evidence, but cannot alter a commercial contract or override physical stock certification to make its numbers conform.

The first-year outcome is a reporting pack that reconciles consolidated results to entity records and distinguishes validated estimates from open exceptions. The following cycle should show fewer recurring overrides, stronger deputy-controller capability and clear evidence that remediation worked in live transactions. Delhi NCR is the primary base, with structured visits to distribution and finance operations. Beyond the opening programme, you remain accountable for adapting the architecture as the group acquires entities, changes channels and faces new commercial reporting requirements.

What you will own

• Determine the group reporting evidence standard for product movements, accruals and customer adjustments, specifying what entity controllers must demonstrate before a result is included in the consolidated pack.
• Build an exception hierarchy that separates timing differences, unsupported estimates and potentially material control failures, assigning decision owners and resolution dates appropriate to the financial exposure.
• Set finance-control testing around actual transaction pathways and override points, prioritising weaknesses that can distort performance or cash rather than treating every checklist deviation as equally consequential.
• Reconcile entity reporting definitions to approved group accounting positions, documenting legitimate local differences and preventing inconsistent terminology from concealing disagreement about the underlying financial treatment.
• Decide remediation priorities with business heads using recurrence, exposure and operational feasibility, requiring evidence from subsequent transactions before a deficiency is marked closed or removed from committee oversight.
• Develop controller succession and challenge capability through judgement reviews, ensuring regional finance teams can explain material estimates and resist unsupported adjustments without relying on continuous CFO arbitration.

Candidate qualifications

• Bring eighteen to twenty-two years in finance with senior controls, reporting or commercial-finance responsibility in energy, metals or a complex industrial group. Explain a material reporting ambiguity you resolved across entities, including how you separated a valid local treatment from a control failure and what changed in the group's recurring decision process after your intervention.
• Demonstrate rigorous accounting and management-reporting competence with recognised professional training or equivalent depth. You must be able to follow a commercial event through source evidence, accrual, entity close and consolidated presentation. Experience should include challenging estimates under time pressure, not merely accepting controller certifications or using external audit as the first substantive test of their reliability.
• Evidence the design of controls that operating teams could execute in terminals, branches or industrial sites. Describe how you calibrated escalation to risk, reduced unnecessary approvals and tested whether remediation actually changed live transaction behaviour. The required approach respects independent audit while maintaining management ownership of control effectiveness and avoiding a transfer of every difficult judgement to assurance teams.
• Show leadership of multiple controllers and the confidence to stop unsupported reporting without becoming adversarial or commercially uninformed. You should have handled sensitive exceptions, built capable deputies and communicated unresolved risk to executives with precise choices. Judgement about confidentiality, data access and the boundary between finance evidence and physical operational certification is particularly important in this expanded remit.

Application

Applications for this mandate are received in one way only: through the India Board Terminal's application process. It is automated end to end. Your Executive Passport travels to the mandate holder in its confidential form, your answers to the three questions below are read before anything else in your file, and every stage that follows is recorded on your applications page.

There is no address to write to and no intermediary to call. The mandate holder reads what the Terminal delivers and nothing else, which is what keeps the process the same for every applicant and keeps your name out of it until you release it. Applications close on 8 October 2026. Mandate reference CVU-PER-2026-IND-009.