Finance Director Working Capital — FMCG Distribution and Channel Cash Returns

The mandate

A consumer-products business is creating a finance-director role focused on the cash and profitability of its distribution network. Channel expansion has increased sales, but stock placement, promotional claims and customer-credit exceptions now make reported revenue a poor guide to cash generation. The role offers open-ended employment; its opening agenda spans eighteen months and establishes a channel cash-return framework. This director will own sustained financial challenge across distribution decisions, rather than operate a collections campaign that ends as soon as an overdue-balance target is met.

The network includes distributors, organised retail and selected direct channels with different settlement and return arrangements. You will separate genuine demand from stock movement and assess whether promotional support generates collected incremental contribution. Claim deductions need evidence and commercial ownership, not automatic acceptance or repeated dispute. Inventory at a distribution point has economic consequences even when legal title has moved, particularly where returns, expiry support or replenishment promises bring risk back to the business. Those obligations must inform channel expansion and credit decisions before additional volume is committed.

Twenty-five finance colleagues cover channel analysis, credit control and the financial side of inventory planning. You can set routine credit and claim-concurrence thresholds within approved policy and require a revised financial case for unsupported channel terms. Sales retains customer negotiation; replenishment teams own physical deployment. The CFO approves material exposure changes and the commercial COO decides strategic concessions. The director's authority is strongest where evidence and economic consequences need clarification, not where a finance rule would merely push unresolved customer problems into an unrecorded side agreement.

The opening agenda should leave reconciled channel contribution, an owned claims process and a cash forecast that reflects settlement behaviour rather than contractual optimism. Later cycles support assortment, network and investment choices using the same discipline. Mumbai is the base, with regular distributor and warehouse visits to test the narrative behind the reports. The enduring role develops regional finance leaders and monitors whether improved conversion is sustainable after promotional seasons. Success is profitable, funded distribution—not a temporary reduction in receivables achieved by forcing inventory or unresolved claims elsewhere.

What you will own

• Define channel cash-return statements that join realised contribution, promotional support and settlement behaviour, identifying where revenue growth relies on working capital or claims exposure excluded from current profitability reports.
• Decide credit and claim-concurrence thresholds using documented customer behaviour and contractual obligations, routing strategic exceptions to authorised executives with explicit cash and margin consequences before acceptance.
• Build inventory-risk bridges across distributor and direct-channel arrangements, showing how return rights, expiry support or replenishment commitments can preserve economic exposure after an apparent transfer of legal title.
• Challenge promotional investment against collected incremental contribution and residual stock, separating demand creation from short-term placement that leaves the business funding later returns, deductions or markdown support.
• Establish a claims-resolution evidence process with commercial owners, distinguishing valid entitlement from missing documentation and unsupported offsets while preserving a practical route to settle genuine customer disagreements.
• Develop regional channel-finance leaders through field-based reviews and cash forecasting, enabling them to challenge recurring exceptions locally without escalating every distributor or retail deduction to the director.

Candidate qualifications

• Demonstrate senior working-capital and commercial-finance experience in FMCG, food or a transaction-heavy consumer distribution network. Explain a channel decision whose cash economics differed from its revenue presentation, and show how your personal intervention changed credit, stock or promotional support. The evidence should establish sustainable financial improvement rather than a short-lived receivables reduction at the cost of future returns or service.
• Bring at least twenty-eight years in finance with GM, functional-head or comparable leadership scope and a rigorous accounting or business-finance foundation. You must understand channel contribution, claims accruals and cash forecasting in enough detail to challenge their underlying evidence. A particular qualification is less important than demonstrable professional judgement applied to difficult commercial and working-capital choices across a dispersed network.
• Evidence constructive handling of distributor, organised-retail or promotional claims where customer relationships complicated enforcement of standard controls. Describe how you distinguished valid entitlement from weak internal documentation and how you made strategic concessions visible to the right executive. The required approach avoids both automatic acceptance of deductions and blanket rejection that simply encourages informal settlements outside the financial record.
• Have led regional finance and credit-control teams, developed deputies and validated reporting assumptions through distributor or warehouse exposure. You should be able to explain how title transfer differs from retained economic risk, coach teams in exception reasoning and handle customer information securely. Clear boundaries with sales and replenishment are essential: the role provides financial concurrence and challenge without becoming a parallel route for all operating decisions.

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-027.