Director of Chart-of-Accounts Governance

The mandate

The Director will own the chart of accounts as an enduring accounting architecture: a controlled expression of recognition, measurement, presentation and management accountability. The present need is not a larger code list. It is governance that prevents economically different activity being collapsed for convenience, stops equivalent activity fragmenting across local labels and preserves a clear route from entry through statutory and management views.

The first twelve weeks will establish the facts. The appointee will examine account creation patterns, dormant and duplicate use, mapping overrides, unexplained reclassifications and the ownership of hierarchy changes. That evidence will support a design-principles paper and a risk-ranked backlog. No assumption is made about system landscape or reporting footprint before confidential disclosure.

The Director may approve routine account and hierarchy changes within policy, reject requests lacking accounting purpose, require owners to remediate misuse and convene decisions where competing reporting needs arise. Changes affecting reserved policy, statutory presentation or executive management definitions require the designated owner’s approval. The role must prevent architecture governance from becoming either an IT ticket desk or an unaccountable central veto.

By month six, every material code and mapping change should travel through an explicit lifecycle with named data, accounting and reporting owners. By month twelve, the organisation should be able to demonstrate fewer emergency reclassifications, greater mapping stability and timely retirement of redundant accounts. The successful leader will also create an impact-assessment discipline so that a locally convenient change does not silently damage consolidation, reconciliation or disclosure.

Permanent value depends on stewardship and capability. The Director will build a council of accountable domain owners, publish interpretable standards and develop deputies able to adjudicate normal cases. Success is a chart that evolves under control without requiring the Director to arbitrate every request personally.

What you will own

• Define design principles for account granularity, hierarchy ownership, allowed dimensions, mapping inheritance and retirement.
• Create a governed request route that captures accounting purpose, affected outputs, alternatives considered and effective date.
• Approve or reject standard chart changes within delegation and route policy-sensitive matters to the correct reserved authority.
• Rationalise duplicate, unused and misclassified accounts through evidence-led waves that preserve comparative reporting and audit trail.
• Establish impact testing across posting, consolidation, reconciliation, statutory presentation and management reporting before release.
• Measure emergency account creation, manual reclassification, mapping volatility and post-change defects as indicators of architecture health.
• Chair a cross-functional governance council while keeping accounting meaning, technical implementation and reporting ownership distinct.
• Build named successors and domain stewards capable of maintaining the architecture under agreed principles.

Candidate qualifications

• Demonstrate senior ownership of a chart-of-accounts architecture where accounting meaning, not only master-data hygiene, drove design.
• Describe a proposed account or hierarchy change you rejected and the reporting or control damage that your challenge prevented.
• Show how you rationalised legacy codes while preserving historical comparability and traceability of opening balances.
• Evidence fluency in group and statutory mappings, consolidation structures, dimensional reporting and access-control consequences.
• Provide metrics that revealed chart misuse before it appeared as a late reporting reclassification.
• Explain how you balanced local reporting needs with global consistency without forcing economically dissimilar activity into one code.
• Show a governance model that distributed routine decisions to stewards while retaining effective central challenge.

Working terms and boundaries

• The role is a full-time permanent stewardship appointment, with first-year gates after design, pilot rationalisation and scaled adoption.
• Authority covers chart policy and delegated changes; technology configuration and reserved accounting elections remain with their designated owners.
• Incentive assessment considers reporting quality, reduced exception dependence and successor strength, not simply the number of codes removed.
• Hybrid attendance will intensify around governance councils, design workshops and material release decisions.
• Candidates must disclose interests or advisory relationships that could influence selection of architecture or implementation partners.

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 5 October 2026. Mandate reference FNA-PER-2026-TYO-09.