Senior Vice President Payroll Platform Finance — Contract and Service Governance

The mandate

A payroll-technology platform combines recurring subscriptions with customer implementation and managed processing services. Its finance organisation needs clearer ownership of how contract promises, onboarding effort and billing timing affect profit and cash. The senior vice president payroll platform finance will lead that permanent function, establishing financial control and planning that support growth without treating recurring revenue measures as proof that implementation costs or collection obligations have already been resolved.

Nineteen professionals cover accounting, planning and billing. The SVP may set finance routines, approve supported adjustments within delegation and require financial review before non-standard customer terms are agreed. Payroll product configuration, customer employment-law advice and operational payroll approval remain with qualified owners. Material contract concessions, investment and changes to finance policy require chief executive or group CFO approval. The role must preserve those boundaries while making their financial dependencies understandable.

Employment is open-ended, with an initial eighteen-month agenda for revenue governance, implementation economics and reliable cash forecasting. Bengaluru is the hybrid base, with planned working sessions at implementation and service locations. The SVP will test whether finance receives evidence of customer acceptance and service milestones at the right time, rather than assume a signed contract alone supports every revenue or billing conclusion throughout the relationship.

The continuing responsibility is a finance team able to reconcile contract, service and accounting information and provide practical executive choices. It does not include becoming the payroll operations chief, tax adviser to customers or software engineering owner. The SVP will nevertheless challenge weak input quality and unsupported growth assumptions, especially where customer onboarding delays consume cash or create commitments not reflected in the platform's subscription-led performance narrative.

What you will own

• Establish a contract-to-financial-record bridge covering subscriptions, implementation and managed services, identifying the evidence needed for billing, accounting and forecast treatment without assuming that every contract follows one standard delivery pattern.
• Decide supported finance adjustments within policy and delegation, documenting customer acceptance or service evidence and escalating non-standard treatment when the contractual substance cannot be resolved through routine accounting practice.
• Build implementation profitability and cash forecasts that distinguish initial delivery effort from recurring service economics, showing executives where onboarding delays or concessions change the value of an apparently attractive customer.
• Govern customer billing and collection reviews with service owners, separating genuine milestone disputes from operational errors and assigning a practical decision route for balances that cannot be resolved through routine follow-up.
• Recommend platform resource choices through reconciled performance analysis, testing growth and renewal assumptions while leaving software priorities and customer payroll-operating decisions with their accountable specialist owners.
• Develop finance managers who can interpret varied commercial arrangements, maintain controlled reporting and challenge incomplete service evidence constructively, creating reliable succession and delegated judgement as the platform grows.

Candidate qualifications

• Bring 18–22 years in finance with senior finance-and-accounts or VP-level accountability and relevant exposure to payroll, HR technology or financial-service operations. Demonstrate how service complexity affected a financial decision you personally owned. Selection will test the substance of your leadership and the breadth of the finance perimeter, not assume that experience administering payroll alone establishes readiness to lead platform finance.
• Have rigorous accounting, budgeting and financial-governance competence, supported by finance education or a recognised professional qualification. Explain how you assessed a contract with more than one service component and obtained the evidence needed for its financial treatment. You should understand when legal or technical advice is required and avoid substituting a convenient subscription metric for supported accounting judgement.
• Show practical planning across implementation cost, recurring service demand and customer cash timing. Evidence should include an onboarding or renewal assumption you changed after operational review. The candidate must be able to distinguish attractive booked revenue from a customer arrangement whose effort or delayed billing creates a material funding burden not captured by the initial commercial case.
• Have led accounting and business-finance managers through a common control and planning framework, with constructive partnership across sales and service teams. You must be comfortable examining customer milestone evidence, delegating routine decisions and escalating unresolved treatment promptly. The platform finance SVP needs to build dependable financial capability without claiming authority over customer employment-law advice, payroll approval or software architecture outside the role.

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 10 October 2026. Mandate reference CVU-PER-2026-IND-123.