Integration Finance Director — Industrial Energy Cash and Close Stabilisation

The mandate

An industrial-energy business has completed an acquisition and needs executive finance leadership through the integration period. The acquired company still uses different cash authorisations and close assumptions, while customer contracts contain delivery and settlement provisions unfamiliar to the parent team. You will start on 26 October 2026 for twelve months and hold the finance seat while a permanent director is recruited. The task is to establish dependable executive control without assuming every inherited practice must immediately be replaced by the parent's version.

The opening six weeks require a verified view of bank accounts, committed payments, customer receipts and material close adjustments. You will identify whether differences reflect legitimate contract economics, weak source evidence or incompatible policies. Commercial leaders must understand the cash consequences of continuing service obligations and disputed customer deductions. The integration plan should then sequence reporting and control changes according to risk, recognising that a rushed consolidation can create new reconciliation failures even while appearing to remove organisational complexity.

The interim leads twenty-three finance colleagues, can authorise payments within the approved delegation and sets temporary controls around unsupported balances or customer-credit exceptions. The group CFO approves policy changes with material reporting impact, and the board reserves new debt, asset disposals and restructuring. You cannot settle acquisition warranties or change contracted service obligations without the relevant executive and legal consent. Plant operations, energy procurement strategy and enterprise-system replacement are out of scope; finance contributes their economic evidence but does not inherit their programme ownership.

The fixed term ends in October 2027, with no extension offered. Before handover, three consecutive closes must reconcile entity and group views, a tested cash forecast must capture acquired obligations and unresolved treatment differences must have approved owners and decisions. The permanent director will receive a prioritised integration backlog rather than a claim that all acquisition complexity has disappeared. Ahmedabad is the operating base, with regular customer and site exposure. Your exit is judged by the successor's ability to run finance, not the number of parent templates adopted.

What you will own

• Establish a verified acquisition-period cash position that includes inherited payment commitments and customer deductions, identifying immediate liquidity decisions before routine group reporting obscures local settlement obligations.
• Decide temporary payment and credit controls according to observed exposure, recording when each safeguard can be retired after the underlying integration weakness has been demonstrably corrected.
• Reconcile acquired accounting positions with approved group policies, separating contract-specific treatment from unsupported practice and placing material disagreements before the CFO with evidence and viable alternatives.
• Set the close-stabilisation sequence around high-risk reconciliations and source dependencies, requiring repeatable entity-to-group bridges before changing the timetable or declaring reporting integration complete.
• Challenge commercial recovery forecasts using actual service obligations, deduction histories and dispute ownership, preventing optimistic collections from funding commitments that the acquired business must meet regardless of recovery.
• Prepare the permanent director's induction pack with tested controls, key accounting decisions and residual integration risks, validating that local finance leads can reproduce the cash and close processes unaided.

Candidate qualifications

• Bring eighteen to twenty-two years of finance experience with head-of-function accountability in energy, industrial services or a comparable acquired business. Describe an integration choice you personally owned where adopting the parent's process would have weakened control or misunderstood a contract. Explain how you established the evidence, escalated the disagreement and preserved effective executive oversight during the transition.
• Demonstrate accounting, treasury and commercial-finance depth sufficient to hold the whole finance-director perimeter at this scale. A strong professional finance background is expected. You must be able to distinguish contractual settlement exposure from bookkeeping discrepancies and connect close adjustments to cash implications, without relying on a large transformation team to supply every diagnostic or decision recommendation.
• Evidence direct authority over payments, customer-credit exceptions and month-end judgement during a leadership gap. Show how you implemented proportionate temporary safeguards, avoided paralysing operations and retired controls once their underlying cause was addressed. Experience should include working constructively with acquired-company staff who may understand the commercial evidence better than the incoming group integration team.
• Commit to an Ahmedabad-based start on 26 October 2026 and a fixed twelve-month engagement. Demonstrate a previous successor induction using tested processes and a candid residual-risk agenda. You should recognise when acquisition warranties, legal interpretation or operational restructuring belong elsewhere, and resist accepting those responsibilities merely because finance is the most stable function during a difficult integration period.

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-INT-2026-IND-010.