Principal Commercial Finance Controls Director — Food Sales Ledger

The mandate

A food distributor needs to define how commercial claims, customer deductions and promotional settlements reach its financial ledger with valid approval and supporting evidence. Regional workarounds have created different interpretations of the same transaction. The principal controls specialist will establish the design method and deliver a sales-to-ledger blueprint with a tested operating pack, while existing executives retain controllership and responsibility for collecting disputed balances.

The project starts on 26 October 2026 and runs six months, reserving four working days each week. By 18 December 2026, the first milestone is an evidenced transaction and exception baseline. By 26 February 2027, the second is a target workflow and control-design pack. The final milestone on 26 April 2027 is a validated pilot, training material and transfer book covering the approved process perimeter.

The CFO and sales-operations head jointly accept the outputs. Acceptance requires traceable source-to-ledger samples across agreed transaction types, documented approval routes and repeatable exception tests using records withheld from design workshops. Internal owners must demonstrate that they can apply the workflow and reproduce its reconciliations. Fees are released 20%, 35% and 45% at the three accepted stages; disputed live claims or future collection results do not determine project completion.

The sponsor provides contracts, ledger extracts, customer deduction records and an eight-person working group, with technology support for interface questions. The consultant controls method and project evidence, while executives retain financial approvals and employee management. System replacement, tax advice and external customer negotiations are excluded. Any additional region or transaction class requires an agreed scope change with revised acceptance samples, timing and fees before work expands beyond the original design boundary.

What you will own

• Map the first-milestone transaction baseline from customer terms through claims, approvals and journal entries, identifying where documentary gaps or inconsistent classifications prevent an independent reviewer from reproducing the financial result.
• Define an exception taxonomy that separates pricing disputes, promotional conditions, returns and unsupported deductions, linking each category to the evidence and accountable internal decision owner needed for resolution.
• Design the second-milestone control pack with approval thresholds, reconciliation rules and escalation routes, checking that the proposed workflow is executable with the sponsor's actual staffing and available system information.
• Build pilot acceptance samples that include incomplete evidence and conflicting transaction attributes, testing whether the workflow identifies the issue rather than simply reproducing a clean demonstration prepared by the design team.
• Produce role-specific operating guidance and a financial reconciliation bridge, enabling regional staff to apply the new process without relying on the consultant's personal interpretation of every unusual claim.
• Facilitate final acceptance and transfer by having internal owners execute withheld samples, record residual limitations and confirm maintenance responsibility for the control pack after the six-month engagement closes.

Candidate qualifications

• Show a 22–28-year finance career with senior responsibility for sales operations, internal-control design or commercial accounting in food, FMCG, healthcare products or another complex distribution setting. Bring a completed transformation where the accepted output changed how transactions were evidenced and approved. A general process presentation without operational validation or identifiable acceptance owners is insufficient.
• Demonstrate detailed knowledge of customer deductions, rebates, accruals and sales-to-ledger reconciliation. You must be able to distinguish a missing document from an incorrect economic interpretation and design tests for both. Formal accounting or finance grounding is important; selection will examine the quality of your technical reasoning and how you use specialists when legal or tax interpretation falls outside the project's competence.
• Have led cross-functional design workshops without allowing the most influential stakeholder's preferred process to define the evidence standard. Describe how you selected a pilot sample, handled exceptions that contradicted your initial design and transferred maintenance to internal owners. Your work should leave a reproducible method rather than an ongoing dependency on a consultant to explain what the process means.
• Be able to reserve four days weekly for the full six-month term, including onsite discovery and pilot sessions in Delhi NCR and agreed regions. Bring disciplined change control, versioned deliverables and clear stage acceptance. The fee prices the defined artifact set, so a credible candidate must know how to identify additional scope before absorbing it or making untested claims about project completion.

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 14 October 2026. Mandate reference CVU-CON-2026-IND-103.