We are looking for a senior, commercially astute Strategic Finance Manager to own the complete customer revenue lifecycle—from signed contract through billing, collection, renewal, and revenue realization.
This role will serve as the single point of accountability for customer contracts, existing commercials, billing readiness, payment terms, receivables, renewals, and revenue visibility. The successful candidate will work across Sales, Customer Success, Finance, Legal, Delivery, and customer stakeholders to identify and remove anything that delays invoicing, collection, renewal, or revenue recognition.
This is a hands-on leadership role requiring strong commercial judgment, financial discipline, customer-facing confidence, and the ability to drive closure across multiple teams.
Key Responsibilities
1. End-to-End Revenue Ownership
- Own the customer revenue lifecycle from contract execution through invoicing, collection, renewal, and closure.
- Establish a single, reliable view of contracted revenue, billable revenue, billed revenue, collections, overdue receivables, renewals, and revenue at risk.
- Track each account against contractual and commercial commitments, ensuring that revenue milestones are achieved on time.
- Identify revenue leakage, slippages, unbilled items, underbilling, missed escalations, and delayed collections, and drive corrective action.
2. Customer Contracts and Commercial Governance
- Own the central repository and operating governance for all active customer contracts, amendments, statements of work, purchase orders, order forms, and related commercial documents.
- Maintain a clear account-level record of pricing, scope, contract term, billing frequency, payment terms, renewal dates, escalation clauses, credits, discounts, penalties, and other commercial obligations.
- Ensure commercial terms agreed during sales are complete, operationally executable, and correctly reflected in billing and collection workflows.
- Review non-standard commercials and payment terms, flag risks, and coordinate approvals before commitments are made.
- Partner with Legal, Sales, Finance, and Delivery to resolve contractual ambiguities or gaps that could affect revenue.
3. Billing Readiness and Revenue Unblocking
- Ensure all prerequisites for timely and accurate billing are in place, including signed contracts, purchase orders, acceptance documents, usage data, milestone confirmations, tax information, and customer billing details.
- Own the revenue-blocker tracker and drive each issue to closure with a named owner and deadline.
- Proactively engage internal teams and customer stakeholders to resolve missing documentation, approval delays, portal issues, milestone disputes, or operational dependencies.
- Create escalation mechanisms for material revenue risks and ensure senior management has timely visibility.
4. Collections and Receivables
- Own collections performance across the customer portfolio, including aging reviews, follow-ups, promises to pay, escalations, and recovery plans.
Drive disciplined account-level collection plans for overdue and high-risk receivables. Engage directly with customer finance, procurement, business, and senior stakeholders to unblock delayed payments.
- Challenge unfavorable payment terms and work with commercial teams to improve cash-flow outcomes in new and renewed contracts.
- Coordinate the resolution of withholding tax, credit-note, invoice-submission, reconciliation, and payment-allocation issues.
5. Billing Disputes and Customer Resolution
Act as the senior owner for billing and commercial disputes with customers. Diagnose the root cause of disputes, align relevant internal stakeholders, and negotiate practical resolution without unnecessary revenue or relationship loss.
Track disputed amounts, aging, actions, dependencies, and expected resolution dates. Use dispute trends to improve contracting, handoffs, documentation, billing accuracy, and commercial governance.
6. Renewals and Commercial Expansion Readiness
Own the renewal calendar and ensure preparation begins well ahead of contract expiry. Partner with Customer Success and Sales on renewal strategy, commercials, pricing changes, contractual obligations, consumption or usage position, and customer risks. Ensure renewal proposals, approvals, negotiations, documentation, purchase orders, and billing transitions are completed without revenue interruption.
Highlight churn, contraction, delay, and repricing risks early and drive mitigation plans.
7. Revenue Visibility, Forecasting, and Reporting
- Build and maintain management dashboards covering contracted revenue, billing schedules, invoice status, collections, DSO, aging, renewals, disputes, revenue blockers, and revenue at risk.
- Provide accurate weekly and monthly forecasts for billing, collections, renewals, and expected revenue realization.
Run structured operating reviews with clear actions, owners, deadlines, and escalations. Reconcile CRM, contract, billing, accounting, and collection data to create one trusted view of customer revenue.
- Provide leadership with concise commentary on variances, risks, dependencies, and required decisions.
8. Process, Controls, and Cross-Functional Leadership
- Design and institutionalize controls, workflows, SLAs, and accountabilities across contract-to-cash and renewal processes.
- Define clean handoffs among Sales, Customer Success, Legal, Finance, Delivery, and Billing.
- Improve systems and automation for contract data, invoicing, collections, renewal alerts, and revenue reporting.
- Influence senior stakeholders without relying solely on formal authority and create a strong culture of ownership and closure.
- Lead or build a revenue assurance team as the function scales.
Key Success Measures
- Billing completed accurately and on schedule
- Collections achieved against plan
- Reduction in DSO and overdue receivables
- Reduction in unbilled revenue and revenue leakage
- Timely resolution of billing disputes and revenue blockers
- Renewal completion before contract expiry
- Improvement in payment terms and commercial quality
- Accuracy of billing, collection, and renewal forecasts
- Complete and reliable contract and commercial data
- Reduction in revenue at risk due to internal or customer dependencies
Experience and Qualifications
- 10+ years of relevant experience in revenue assurance, commercial finance, order-to-cash, collections, deal desk, revenue operations, customer commercial management, or a related function.
- Demonstrated ownership of complex B2B customer contracts, billing, receivables, collections, renewals, and commercial disputes.
- Strong understanding of SaaS, subscription, usage-based, milestone-based, or enterprise contracting and billing models.
- Proven ability to engage confidently with customer finance, procurement, legal, and senior business stakeholders.
- Strong financial and commercial acumen, with the ability to interpret contracts and translate terms into operational actions.
- Experience building dashboards, forecasts, review mechanisms, and controls using CRM, ERP, billing, and reporting systems.
- Excellent negotiation, stakeholder management, problem-solving, and written communication skills.
- High attention to detail, combined with the ability to prioritize material risks and drive rapid closure.
- Bachelor’s degree in Finance, Accounting, Business, or a related field; CA, MBA, or equivalent qualification is preferred.
