Director, Close Analytics and Journal Governance

The mandate

The Director will build a permanent analytical control over journals and close movement, turning transaction patterns into targeted accounting challenge. The objective is not a surveillance dashboard or indiscriminate reduction in manual entries. It is to identify entries whose timing, preparation, approval, repetition or balance effect demands deeper review and to connect findings to accountable remediation.

The first ninety days will establish journal populations, approval design, recurring manual patterns, late-posting behaviour, reversals and the relationship between flagged entries and financial-statement risk. The Director will test whether existing rules identify meaningful exceptions or merely high volumes of explainable activity. Data limitations will be stated openly rather than concealed by scoring.

Authority includes defining accounting-risk rules, requiring investigation of selected entries, rejecting deficient explanations and directing root-cause reviews. The role does not own fraud investigation, employee discipline, system security or final significant-accounting approvals. Suspected misconduct will enter the designated confidential route.

By month six, a governed rule inventory and case workflow should operate, with false positives and missed risks reviewed deliberately. By month twelve, repeated late or unsupported journal classes should decline and analytical findings should inform close planning, access reviews and policy education. Metrics must distinguish a genuinely safer process from teams simply learning how to avoid a rule.

The Director will develop analysts and controllers able to frame accounting hypotheses, inspect evidence and communicate proportionately. Durable success means analytics sharpen professional judgment and lead to source corrections; it does not mean replacing accountable review with an opaque score.

What you will own

• Build a journal-risk taxonomy using timing, user, amount, account combination, reversal, frequency and approval evidence.
• Validate rule precision through sampled true positives, false positives and known cases the rules initially missed.
• Establish a case workflow with investigation owner, accounting consequence, escalation route and verified closure.
• Direct root-cause correction where recurring entries reveal policy, process, training or source-record weaknesses.
• Integrate material findings into close risk planning without duplicating independent investigation functions.
• Govern rule changes, thresholds and access so that analytic logic remains understandable and controlled.
• Report outcomes through risk resolved, recurrence and correction evidence rather than raw alert counts.
• Build multidisciplinary capability in accounting analysis, data interpretation and proportionate escalation.

Candidate qualifications

• Demonstrate leadership of journal or close analytics grounded in accounting risk rather than generic anomaly detection.
• Describe a rule that produced misleading alerts and how validation changed its design.
• Show an investigation where a journal pattern revealed a source policy or control weakness.
• Evidence command of manual entry governance, approvals, reversals, post-close postings and balance-sheet consequence.
• Explain how you protected due process when an accounting exception also raised conduct concerns.
• Provide measures that identified rule evasion or superficial compliance after controls changed.
• Show that you can lead data specialists while retaining interpretable accounting judgment.

Working terms and boundaries

• This permanent full-time appointment owns accounting analytics and journal governance within defined close authority.
• Fraud investigation, employee discipline, access administration and reserved accounting decisions remain with designated functions.
• Incentives prioritise sustained risk reduction and transparent logic, not maximum alert volume or manual-entry elimination.
• Hybrid work includes in-person rule-design reviews, close governance and sensitive case discussions.
• Candidate conflicts involving analytics vendors, assurance relationships or relevant investigations require disclosure.

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 FNA-PER-2026-CPH-29.