Principal Finance Service Architecture Lead — Purchase and Collection Handoffs

The mandate

A financial-services GBS and its retained finance teams disagree about who resolves selected purchase and collection exceptions. Formal process maps allocate activities, but they do not specify the evidence and authority required when an invoice is disputed, a receipt is unidentified or a service request cannot advance. The Principal Finance Service Architecture Lead will create a workable control-ownership package for twelve agreed handoff scenarios.

The engagement lasts four months from 26 October 2026 at three working days per week. Its principal specialist remit combines process design, control reasoning and practical operator testing rather than executive management of the service teams. The defined perimeter covers selected procure-to-pay and order-to-cash interfaces; record-to-report, payroll and reward-policy work are excluded, as are commercial credit decisions and changes to customer or supplier legal terms.

On 30 November 2026, the first milestone supplies an observed handoff inventory, evidence-gap map and draft decision routes. The second milestone on 15 January 2027 delivers approved ownership specifications and tested scenario procedures. Final delivery on 26 February 2027 contains the operating playbook, exception replay evidence and a maintenance change log covering the agreed four-month term.

The Finance Services Head and Retained Finance Operations Director accept artifacts together, obtaining specialist concurrence where a scenario depends on accounting, procurement or commercial authority. Tests must demonstrate that a service operator can identify the next authorised owner, provide the required evidence and escalate an unresolved case without circular referral. The sponsor supplies process records, sampled exception cases, access to retained decision owners and four available analysts.

Fee releases are 30%, 35% and 35% after the accepted milestones. Acceptance is not conditional on collecting an outstanding debt or securing a supplier concession; it rests on tested ownership and usable operating procedures. New countries, system automation and additional scenario families require a signed scope and price change. The consultant cannot settle disputes, release banking payments or accept control risk on management's behalf.

What you will own

• Observe sampled purchase and receipt exceptions from their original facts through every referral, identifying the decision or evidence gap that makes an apparently assigned activity circulate between teams.
• Define the twelve-scenario perimeter and specialist authority dependencies, giving the first milestone a testable boundary instead of promising an unrestricted redesign of all finance service responsibilities.
• Construct ownership specifications that separate processing, factual confirmation and authorised judgement, preventing a service operator from being assigned a decision that legally or organisationally belongs to another function.
• Develop evidence checklists for each handoff scenario, testing whether the receiving owner obtains enough relevant information to decide without requesting the same records repeatedly from different teams.
• Run unfamiliar-case trials with service operators and retained owners, recording circular referrals, missing permissions and instructions that fail before the second-stage procedures are accepted.
• Prepare the final playbook and maintenance controls with explicit exceptions, distinguishing approved routes from optional automation opportunities and matters excluded because their authority or source facts remain unresolved.
• Conduct owner-operated replay and transfer sessions, obtaining joint acceptance that the procedures can be applied and amended without consultant intervention or an informal escalation to a person outside the agreed route.

Candidate qualifications

• Demonstrate substantial finance shared-services process design or transformation experience across purchase and collection operations. Describe a handoff that remained defective despite a completed process map, the actual case evidence you inspected and the control or decision-route change made. The relevant contribution is functional architecture that operators could use, not merely facilitating a workshop or publishing an activity matrix.
• Bring applied understanding of P2P and O2C exceptions, including the distinction between transaction processing, commercial facts and authorised financial judgement. Explain a disputed invoice or unidentified receipt whose ownership needed redesign, identifying which specialist retained the decision and what evidence the service team had to supply. Broader finance experience must not become an unsupported claim of credit or legal authority.
• Show rigorous operating test and acceptance methods for service design. You should have used unfamiliar cases, recorded failure modes and changed instructions or ownership when a proposed route did not work. Describe a practical trial that overturned an apparently agreed design and how the receiving owner accepted the revised procedure, including unresolved limitations kept outside the tested perimeter.
• Establish principal-level consulting judgement, concise sponsor communication and protected three-day weekly capacity. Transformation or project-management methods should be evidenced through usable control artifacts and a durable internal handover. Provide an example of maintaining scope when sponsors wanted wider remediation, the signed decision taken and how you left owners able to maintain the procedures after the specialist engagement ended.

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 CVU-CON-2026-IND-066.