Role Overview:
Looking for a senior finance professional who can strengthen financial visibility, business control, and process discipline across a fast-growing multi-entity education and skills ecosystem. This role is meant for a hands-on leader who understands how growth-stage organizations operate, and who can bring structure without slowing the business down.
The role will work directly with the founders and act as a financial control partner across entities, business verticals, and strategic initiatives. The mandate is to build a strong maker-checker finance layer across budgeting, cash flow control, management reporting, profitability visibility, project costing, business dashboards, and governance.
This role is ideal for someone who combines business finance, financial controls, planning, and process orientation, and who is comfortable operating in an entrepreneurial environment with evolving systems and multiple revenue models.
Key Responsibilities:
1. Founder-Level Financial Control and Decision Support
- Work closely with the founders as a finance sounding board on cash flows, margins, capital allocation, and business priorities.
- Translate financial data into practical insights for decision-making.
- Create a founder-level finance review rhythm with weekly, monthly, and quarterly reporting packs.
- Highlight early warning signs on profitability, working capital pressure, receivables delays, cost overruns, and inefficient deployment of funds.
2. Cash Flow Management and Financial Visibility
- Build and institutionalize a rolling cash flow management framework.
- Track inflows, outflows, liabilities, committed payments, project cash requirements, and expected collections.
- Improve visibility into entity-wise and business-wise cash position.
- Support founders in prioritizing payments and capital deployment based on business realities and strategic importance.
3. Business-Wise P&L and Profitability Tracking
- Develop monthly P&L dashboards across different entities, projects, campuses, and business models.
- Build profitability views for government projects, university operations, B2B partnerships, B2C initiatives, work-integrated programs, and new strategic verticals.
- Identify profit centers, loss-making initiatives, margin leakages, and underperforming business lines.
- Improve costing discipline and help define unit economics wherever needed.
4. Budgeting, Planning, and Financial Discipline
- Drive annual operating plans, budgets, and periodic forecasting across business units.
- Establish budget vs actual reporting and review mechanisms.
- Work with business leaders to improve planning discipline and cost ownership.
- Create simple but effective approval frameworks for spending, project budgets, and cost commitments.
5. Dashboards, MIS, and Management Reporting
- Design and own meaningful dashboards for founders and leadership.
- Build reporting frameworks for revenue, collections, costs, profitability, working capital, and business performance.
- Improve reliability, consistency, and timeliness of MIS.
- Ensure that financial reporting is not just backward-looking, but decision-oriented.
6. Controls, Governance, and Maker-Checker Systems
- Strengthen maker-checker controls across the finance ecosystem.
- Review payment structures, approval controls, reconciliation discipline, and audit readiness.
- Build process checkpoints to reduce errors, leakage, and dependency on individuals.
- Conduct basic financial reviews and internal checks to improve discipline and transparency.
7. Cross-Functional Finance Business Partnering
- Work with business, operations, admissions, project teams, HR, and leadership to improve financial understanding and accountability.
- Support commercial decision-making on pricing, partner structures, project viability, and financial implications of new initiatives.
- Bring finance thinking into business reviews, rather than staying limited to finance department processes.
8. Process Structuring and Finance Transformation
- Map existing finance and reporting processes and identify gaps.
- Recommend and implement improvements in systems, controls, templates, and review cadences.
- Support better structuring of financial data across multiple entities and business streams.
- Help move the organization from fragmented reporting to structured, comparable, actionable finance information.
Qualifications & Skills Required:
- CA preferred; CMA / MBA Finance / equivalent also acceptable with strong relevant experience
- 8 to 15 years of experience in finance leadership, business finance, FP&A, financial control, or commercial finance roles
- Experience in growth-stage or scale-up environments preferred
- Prior exposure to multi-entity, multi-vertical, or high-transaction businesses will be strongly preferred
- Experience in sectors such as education, edtech, skilling, staffing, healthcare, logistics, BPO, or other process-heavy service businesses will be an advantage
Functional Strengths:
- Strong understanding of cash flow management, budgeting, management reporting, and financial controls
- Ability to build and interpret business-wise P&L and profitability models
- Strong grip on dashboards, MIS, business analytics, and finance reporting structures
- Ability to work across both strategic and operational finance issues
- Comfortable building systems and processes in imperfect, evolving environments
Personal Attributes:
- Highly hands-on and execution-oriented
- Strong business judgement and commercial orientation
- Detail-conscious, but not bureaucratic
- Comfortable working directly with founders
- High ownership mindset
- Ability to challenge constructively and bring clarity in ambiguity
- Strong ethics, maturity, and confidentiality
What We Offer:
- Opportunity to architect and scale a future-focused, industry-integrated higher education ecosystem.
- Competitive compensation with performance-linked incentives.
- Leadership role in a rapidly growing national skills and university platform.
- A collaborative, mission-driven environment.
- The opportunity to create a measurable impact on employability and workforce transformation at scale.
(ref:iimjobs.com)