Purchase-to-Pay Control Stabilisation Director

The mandate

An interim director is required to take immediate operating command of purchase-to-pay control recovery while a permanent leadership solution is completed. The present gap is not simply overdue work. Exceptions move between procurement, receiving, master data, payables and treasury without durable ownership, creating duplicate effort, late-payment exposure and inconsistent evidence at the point of payment.

In the first ten working days, the director will establish a daily control room, verify the payable and exception populations, protect critical payment continuity and identify any control that is being represented as performed without sufficient evidence. The director can reassign work within the recovery team, set temporary approval thresholds and stop a payment queue where control conditions are not met, subject to the standing treasury authorities.

The first 60 days must reduce the high-risk backlog, introduce ageing and root-cause disciplines, and restore a reliable path from approved obligation to authorised disbursement. The next phase converts emergency routines into normal process ownership, including clean handoffs for unmatched invoices, disputed receipts, vendor changes, duplicate indicators and urgent-payment requests.

The interim leader owns recovery execution and the temporary operating cadence. The role does not renegotiate commercial contracts, redesign procurement policy, approve banking authority changes or certify financial statements. Matters requiring those decisions must be evidenced and escalated to the designated owner rather than absorbed into the recovery effort.

Handover begins by month six, not at the end of the appointment. The incoming permanent owner should receive an evidenced backlog position, named control accountabilities, trained deputies, a tested weekly rhythm and a 90-day successor plan. Extension is available only if the successor transition is incomplete and must not become a reason to defer institutional ownership.

What you will own

• Validate open invoices, unmatched items, payment blocks, vendor-change exceptions and urgent requests, separating genuine obligations from duplicates or unsupported records.
• Install a daily recovery board with exposure-based priorities, named case ownership and ageing that cannot be reset by moving an item between queues.
• Exercise temporary authority to sequence recovery resources, require supporting evidence and pause unsafe payment batches within existing treasury limits.
• Stabilise the vendor-change and payment-release control chain, documenting compensating measures where the standard route cannot operate.
• Reduce avoidable late-payment exposure and prevent recovery activity from producing duplicate disbursements or inaccurate liability recognition.
• Establish root-cause feedback into procurement, receiving and master-data ownership with measurable closure of repeat exception sources.
• Replace the control room with an operational weekly cadence once agreed stability conditions have been sustained for two reporting cycles.
• Complete a structured successor handover with process health, residual risks, decision log, talent assessment and 90-day priorities.

Candidate qualifications

• Demonstrate executive recovery of a purchase-to-pay environment where payment continuity and control integrity had to be protected simultaneously.
• Show how you validated an apparently urgent payable population and found duplicates, unsupported obligations or misleading ageing.
• Evidence practical command of invoice matching, receipt dependencies, vendor master controls, payment proposals, segregation and cash cut-offs.
• Provide an example of stopping or delaying a payment run under pressure and the evidence used to sustain that decision.
• Bring calm on-site leadership, rapid work allocation and the ability to make exceptions visible without normalising them.
• Describe a permanent handover completed before the final weeks of an interim appointment, including successor and deputy preparation.
• Show discretion with sensitive payment data and the judgement to operate strictly inside delegated banking and approval authorities.

Working terms and boundaries

• The interim appointment is eight months at five days a week, with an on-site operating presence required during recovery and key payment cycles.
• Delegated authority covers recovery sequencing, temporary team allocation and control holds within documented approval and treasury limits.
• Contract renegotiation, procurement-policy ownership, banking-authority changes and financial-statement certification are excluded.
• The day rate includes routine handover activity; an extension is considered only for successor continuity and requires a separately recorded decision.
• Month-six handover readiness is a formal outcome, supported by a successor pack and evidenced stability criteria.

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 8 October 2026. Mandate reference FNA-INT-2026-SYD-07.