## About the Role

This role owns the commercial and finance operations that support production payments, vendor relationships, budget tracking, and finance reporting. It is responsible for keeping payment cycles moving, ensuring budgets are monitored closely, and maintaining accurate books and reconciliations.

The position works across teams to manage payment timing, negotiate vendor terms, and keep commercial agreements aligned with operational needs. It also partners with department heads on annual budgeting and supports cost control initiatives across the business.

A key part of the role is strengthening finance operations through better process design and automation. This includes working with tech and data teams on workflow improvements and maintaining accurate records in Zoho Books.

## Key Responsibilities

– Manage the end-to-end production payment cycle, including scheduling, processing, and tracking payments for content production, brand projects, and vendor engagements
– Assess payment deferment requests with relevant stakeholders while balancing cash flow and production continuity
– Negotiate payment terms with vendors and production partners
– Set and maintain a weekly payment release cadence
– Check all payment requisitions against approved budgets before release and flag overruns promptly
– Track department budgets on a monthly basis and highlight variances to leadership
– Lead cost optimisation efforts, including vendor and service contract renegotiation and savings identification
– Manage commercial relationships with vendors, service providers, and real estate counterparts
– Oversee maintenance cost control and support capex versus opex classification
– Partner with department heads to build annual budgets based on operational realities
– Handle contract renewals, rate negotiations, and SLA discussions
– Support accurate payment gateway reconciliation, including pro-rated accounting for annual subscriptions and sale versus collection reconciliation
– Ensure content amortization is recorded accurately across daily, monthly, and yearly schedules
– Work with tech and data teams to support automation of finance workflows
– Maintain books accurately and on time in Zoho Books
– Evaluate additional tools where relevant

## Required Skills

– 4–8 years of experience in finance with exposure to commercial finance, vendor management, production payments, or cost operations
– Experience beyond purely transactional accounting
– Proven ability to manage payment cycles
– Experience negotiating vendor terms
– Experience owning budget tracking across multiple departments
– Strong working knowledge of Zoho Books or a similar accounting platform, with hands-on use
– Strong commercial communication skills
– Ability to negotiate firmly while maintaining productive relationships
– Comfort with AI tools and basic finance automation concepts
– Ability to adopt and direct automation efforts, even if not building them personally

## Preferred Skills

– Experience managing real estate or facility commercial relationships

## Cloud Platforms & Technologies

– **Accounting & Finance Systems:** Zoho Books
– **Payments:** Juspay
– **Automation & AI:** AI tools, AI-assisted MIS
– **Integrations:** Juspay-to-Zoho Books integration

## Why You Might Be Interested

This role offers broad ownership across payments, vendor management, budgeting, and finance operations. It also provides direct access to leadership and functional heads, with visible impact on how the business runs day to day. The position includes exposure to automation work with tech and data teams, along with the opportunity to improve core finance workflows. For someone with strong commercial judgement and hands-on finance experience, it offers substantial scope and responsibility.