Senior Director Finance Transformation — Consulting Invoice Automation Decisions

The mandate

Invoice automation pilots in a technology-consulting group have produced strong document-extraction results but inconsistent operational savings. Consulting subcontractors, reimbursable expenses and multi-line service invoices carry obligations that cannot be inferred from the printed document alone. A new senior director will hold finance-side accountability for deciding which automation paths deserve scaled investment. This is open-ended employment, beginning with an eighteen-month agenda to connect automation economics, financial controls and the work that exception teams actually perform after the demonstration ends.

The role must separate reading an invoice from determining its payable treatment. A tool may extract a project code accurately yet select the wrong approval route; it may recognise tax text without being authorised to determine local tax treatment. You will classify those decisions and define where controlled rules, human review or approved technology can be used. Confidence thresholds need calibration against error consequence and representative document populations, not a convenient aggregate accuracy measure dominated by simple invoices that were already easy to process.

Thirty-four finance specialists and analysts report through transformation leads. You own business prioritisation, finance acceptance and adoption expenditure within the approved programme. Technology leadership retains architecture, security and engineering decisions; tax and controllers approve professional treatments; operational leaders retain live payment responsibilities. Scaling a material automated approval path requires sponsor consent and the relevant control owner's sign-off. You can stop an inadequately tested release, but cannot treat the finance business case as permission to bypass security review or redefine an accounting position.

At the first scaled deployment, the group should know how many touches were genuinely removed, how much exception effort remains and whether errors are detected before they create financial consequences. Later cycles will extend the portfolio only where that evidence holds. Pune is the working base, with pilot-location visits and regular joint reviews with technology teams. The permanent seat includes maintaining the operating model as documents, suppliers and systems change; its success is not measured by commissioning a tool and leaving payable managers to absorb the resulting complexity unaided.

What you will own

• Define the invoice decision inventory by extraction, classification, entitlement and approval consequence, identifying which steps can be automated and which require designated professional judgement or independent evidence.
• Decide pilot priorities using invoice complexity, current rework and control exposure, rejecting business cases that count all manual effort as removable without considering the residual exception population.
• Establish representative test populations with operational owners, including ambiguous subcontractor charges, revised invoices and unsupported project coding so simple documents cannot dominate the readiness conclusion.
• Set finance acceptance thresholds by error consequence and recovery route, requiring traceable overrides and a safe fallback when automation cannot establish the evidence needed for further processing.
• Build the benefits ledger from observed task changes and exception workload, separating capacity released, effort redeployed and avoided demand rather than recording theoretical headcount savings as realised value.
• Authorise adoption support and training within programme limits, assigning process owners for rule changes and preventing unreviewed local workarounds from recreating the control weakness automation was meant to remove.
• Lead periodic degradation reviews as supplier formats and systems change, recommending retraining or release suspension through technology partners while finance retains accountability for its acceptance standard.

Candidate qualifications

• Present an invoice or finance-automation decision you personally challenged after the demonstration appeared successful. Explain the difference between extraction accuracy and valid processing, the representative cases you selected and the error consequence that changed your rollout recommendation. The evidence should include operational adoption and residual work, not only a vendor benchmark or a projected efficiency percentage.
• Your 22–28 years of finance-operations experience must include shared-services transformation and accountable engagement with ERP or automation programmes in technology, consulting or financial services. Show how you shaped the business decision and controlled the finance acceptance process. Engineering or model-development credentials are not required; the ability to interrogate technical claims and translate them into finance controls is essential.
• Demonstrate KPI and working-capital methods that reveal the cost of exception handling. Describe how you distinguished a saved task from displaced work, evaluated supplier or project-code variability and tested whether a new workflow improved the full operating path. Financial judgement must remain reliable when a proposed automation benefit conflicts with tax review, accounting evidence or segregation-of-duties requirements.
• Evidence leadership of transformation specialists alongside live operational teams where release ownership and lasting support were initially unclear. Explain the fallback, rule-change and incident decisions you established, and how managers maintained them after launch. You should have developed finance-side challenge capability rather than depended on personally reviewing every tool output or asked technology colleagues to certify financial treatments outside their authority.

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 15 October 2026. Mandate reference CVU-PER-2026-IND-128.