Forecast Recovery and Performance Director

The mandate

This interim appointment addresses the need to strengthen the forecast as a management instrument and enhance the quality of financial planning processes. The incoming Director must be available to start within four weeks of acceptance.

The work begins with a fast diagnostic of forecast mechanics, assumption ownership and variance narratives. It then moves into a controlled recovery: one forecast baseline, explicit cut-off rules, quantified risks and opportunities, and a weekly view of changes that separates new information from correction of earlier errors.

The Director receives temporary authority to set the forecast timetable, require resubmission, assign owners to unresolved movements and approve the version released to the executive team. Pricing, hiring, investment and operating choices remain with their named leaders. Permanent team design beyond agreed recovery changes, systems replacement and transaction execution are outside scope.

The end condition is not a cosmetically accurate final forecast. It is a repeatable cycle run by the permanent team, supported by written controls and a successor who has led two cycles unaided. The interim leader will taper only after forecast variance is explainable at driver level and handover evidence is accepted by the CFO.

What you will own

• Complete a twenty-business-day forecast integrity review covering data cut-offs, manual adjustments, assumption owners, consolidation logic and executive use cases.
• Publish a single recovery baseline with signed reconciliations to the last approved outlook, actuals and cash view, eliminating parallel versions from formal decisions.
• Install a weekly change ledger that records amount, driver, evidence, owner, confidence, expiry date and management response for every material movement.
• Enforce submission thresholds and return forecasts whose variance explanations cannot distinguish timing, volume, price, mix, productivity and one-off effects.
• Produce a thirteen-week confidence trajectory showing forecast ranges, leading indicators and escalation triggers rather than retrospective variance alone.
• Coach finance partners to hold evidence-led reviews and quantify risk without adding unowned central overlays at consolidation.
• Nominate and prepare a permanent cycle owner, transferring meeting leadership, challenge rights and final-pack production through observed rehearsals.

Candidate qualifications

• Fifteen or more years in FP&A, controllership-facing planning or performance leadership, with repeated time-bound recovery assignments at Director level.
• A case record showing restoration of forecast credibility, including starting error patterns, interventions, accuracy measures and the point at which permanent ownership resumed.
• Strong integrated-modelling skill across profit, working capital and cash, with the ability to diagnose spreadsheet logic and process control without defaulting to system replacement.
• Evidence of imposing submission discipline on senior budget owners while keeping decisions moving under compressed deadlines.
• Practical knowledge of forecast bias, confidence intervals, risk-and-opportunity governance, change control and management-reporting materiality.
• Demonstrated handover practice involving named successors, operating manuals, shadow cycles and acceptance tests rather than an end-of-term document drop.
• Availability to work on-site in Toronto five days each week during diagnosis and the first two recovered cycles.

Working terms and boundaries

• The engagement runs for nine months; any extension is limited to a maximum three-month handover need and requires a fresh written end condition.
• Temporary decision rights cover forecast process, quality gates, version release and issue escalation, but not ownership of operating actions or capital commitments.
• Systems procurement, wholesale organisational redesign and unrelated accounting remediation are excluded; dependencies discovered there will be logged for accountable owners.
• The Director must identify a successor by month three, share authority from month five and observe two successor-led cycles before departure.
• Completion is accepted when controls, reconciliations, ownership maps and performance measures are operating and the CFO signs the handover record.

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 6 October 2026. Mandate reference FPA-INT-2026-TOR-02.