Education Payments and Fee-Collection Controls Pilot — Consulting Specialist

The mandate

Vendor-payment and fee-receipt exceptions are handled through inconsistent local instructions. The consulting assignment will define and test a bounded operating procedure for those two flows, including a dashboard that makes unresolved items visible. It is not a redesign of admissions, procurement policy or the institution's overall finance organisation.

The deliverable is an Education Payment and Receipt Controls Pilot Pack containing source maps, approval steps, exception examples, dashboard definitions and operator training notes. The pack must help staff distinguish incomplete evidence from a genuinely disputed payment or receipt. Procedures should be usable at ordinary operating speed without concealing the retained finance-head approval boundary.

Payment and fee-receipt sampling begins on 19 October 2026 before the three-month control pilot is tested with internal operators. Milestone one on 16 November 2026 provides the sample baseline and ownership map; milestone two on 14 December 2026 delivers draft procedures and the controlled pilot; milestone three on 18 January 2027 completes fresh-transaction testing, operator walkthroughs and the accepted pack. The fee is billed 30%, 30% and 40% against accepted outputs.

The finance operations head accepts work when sampled transactions trace to source, approval routes remain within policy and dashboard totals reconcile to the agreed books. Internal operators must process a new set of exceptions using the guidance and identify matters they cannot decide. Acceptance is not based on a visually finished report or on eliminating every dispute by manual adjustment.

The sponsor supplies approved payment policy, anonymised invoice and fee samples, ledger access and named AP and receipt-accounting operators. Production access remains restricted and changes are tested before use. Payment execution, tax filing, systems procurement and historical record reconstruction beyond the sample are excluded; scope additions require a priced change note and revised acceptance.

What you will own

• Establish a representative transaction baseline covering missing documents, disputed invoices, late fee postings and duplicate references, rather than selecting only clean completed finance records.
• Define payment and receipt ownership steps with explicit retained approvals, ensuring the consultant's procedure cannot grant authority absent from the existing finance policy.
• Construct exception examples that show the evidence needed for disposition and the boundary where operators must escalate instead of making an unsupported accounting decision.
• Build dashboard definitions from approved ledger and transaction sources, retaining refresh rules and reconciliation checks before any management colour coding is introduced.
• Test the proposed procedures on a controlled pilot population, recording processing difficulty, ambiguous instructions and control failures for sponsor-approved rework rather than hiding them.
• Validate internal operator readiness using new transactions and observed escalation choices, identifying training needs separately from defects in the procedure or available source data.
• Deliver the accepted pack and maintenance calendar with named owners, access limits and unresolved dependencies, without taking over normal processing or purchasing an unapproved system.

Candidate qualifications

• Demonstrate practical finance control-project or operational improvement work across payables, receipts or entity accounting. Show a procedure personally written and tested, including a case that caused rework. Candidates must establish specialist competence through concrete records; a senior-sounding title cannot replace evidence of controlling these routine but consequential transaction flows.
• Provide sound accounting and document-control judgement supported by a relevant professional finance qualification or equivalent practice. Explain how a disputed transaction was distinguished from a missing source record. The assignment does not confer authority to make new tax positions, certify audits or reinterpret contracts without the authorised specialist or sponsor.
• Show reporting or dashboard delivery with source definitions, reconciliation and operator maintenance. Bring an example where a field or refresh rule changed after testing a fresh transaction set. Familiarity with analytical software is useful, but the output must remain understandable to ordinary finance staff rather than requiring ongoing consultant manipulation.
• Establish at least four years of relevant experience and disciplined project acceptance at a bounded operational level. Describe training evidence, reviewer sign-off and a limitation transferred honestly. Supplier incentives, software resale or contingent fees from recovering payments are incompatible with an unbiased controls pilot and must be disclosed before access is granted.

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 9 October 2026. Mandate reference PCT-CON-2026-IND-25.