Head Of Finance

PE International is seeking a Head of Finance to lead the financial integrity, planning, and funding discipline across its markets and legal entities. This role acts as both a controller and a strategic business partner, establishing a multi-entity finance function from the Pakistan hub. Responsibilities include ensuring accurate and timely financial closes, leading budgeting, forecasting, and performance analysis, and collaborating closely with the General Manager and Country Managers to guide decisions on pricing, costs, investments, and growth. The position requires independence to uphold financial controls under commercial pressures while being deeply involved in shaping business decisions. In its second phase, the role will expand to include oversight of HR, Administration, and Business Systems.

Key Responsibilities

Controllership and Reporting:
- Own the chart of accounts, accounting policies, close calendar, and control framework across all entities to ensure comparability of results.
- Deliver accurate monthly closes on schedule and provide consolidated financial results to senior leadership.
- Develop a site-level P&L standard to automate contribution and payback reporting.
- Manage statutory accounts, audits, and tax filings in each jurisdiction through local advisors.

Financial Planning & Analysis (FP&A):
- Lead the annual budget and three-year business plan with driver-based models covering key operational metrics.
- Maintain rolling forecasts updated monthly or quarterly, highlighting assumptions, risks, and opportunities.
- Provide monthly performance analysis comparing actuals to budget, forecast, and prior year, explaining variances and agreed actions.
- Prepare management reporting packs and KPI dashboards for leadership at market, site, and product levels.
- Model scenarios for pricing, currency fluctuations, new formats, and site changes.

Treasury, Working Capital, and Funding:
- Manage a rolling 13-week cash forecast per entity and consolidated, ensuring timely funding requests to Group Treasury.
- Oversee foreign exchange exposure, remittances, and payment cycles, particularly for hub costs and cross-border suppliers.
- Drive working capital management, including receivables aging, credit control, supplier terms, inventory provisioning, and dead-stock write-offs.

Intercompany, Tax, and Compliance:
- Establish and maintain intercompany service agreements and cost-plus recharge models with robust transfer pricing documentation.
- Own compliance registers and calendars for corporate tax, VAT, sales tax, withholding, statutory filings, and licenses.
- Manage financial and statutory close-out of exited markets, ensuring no residual exposure.

Business Partnering and Capital Allocation:
- Act as a finance business partner to the GM and Country Managers by attending monthly reviews, challenging performance, and translating numbers into actionable insights.
- Support commercial decisions through detailed financial analysis on pricing, product mix, manpower, and cost reduction.
- Evaluate new-site business cases, capital expenditure proposals, partnerships, franchises, and joint ventures, applying rigorous financial criteria.
- Review and approve financial terms of contracts within delegated authority.
- Conduct post-investment reviews to monitor site performance and recommend turnaround or exit strategies.
- Foster financial awareness among operating teams to ensure ownership of site P&Ls.

Franchise and JV Finance:
- Develop the finance operating model for franchising, including royalty billing, marketing fund accounting, and franchisee credit control.
- Oversee Malaysia JV reporting and board finance matters on behalf of PE International.

Governance and Team Leadership:
- Set standards, tools, and training for country finance teams and participate in their recruitment and evaluation.
- Lead finance control self-assessments across markets and address identified gaps.
- Manage and develop the central finance team while maintaining lean costs as the network expands.

Required Qualifications

Education and Experience:
- Qualified accountant (CA, ACCA, CPA, or CIMA) with a degree in accounting, finance, or commerce; additional tax or IFRS qualifications are advantageous.
- 10–14 years of finance experience, including at least 4 years leading finance functions across multiple countries or entities.
- Proven expertise in controllership (multi-entity consolidation, statutory audits, intercompany structures) and FP&A (budgeting, forecasting, reporting).
- Demonstrated success as a finance business partner influencing commercial decisions.
- Experience in scaling multi-site businesses such as automotive aftermarket, fuel retail, QSR, or retail is highly preferred; franchise experience is a plus.

Technical Competencies:
- Strong knowledge of IFRS, including lease and capex accounting.
- Experience with multi-entity consolidation, transfer pricing, and intercompany recharges.
- Familiarity with UAE corporate tax, VAT, Pakistan taxation, and FX regulations.
- Skilled in treasury management, cash forecasting, and internal controls.
- Proficient in driver-based budgeting, rolling forecasts, variance analysis, and profitability reporting.
- Competent in investment appraisal techniques (NPV, IRR, payback) and scenario modeling.
- Understanding of inventory accounting for parts and consumables and site-level P&L construction.

Systems:
- Experience with ERP systems such as SAP, Oracle, Microsoft Dynamics, or similar, including consolidation tools.
- Advanced skills in Excel, financial modeling, and data visualization tools like Power BI.
- Knowledge of integrating garage management or POS systems with general ledger software.

Leadership:
- Ability to maintain independence and uphold financial controls under commercial pressure.
- Proven capability to build finance functions from a small base without extensive support.
- Skilled at communicating financial concepts clearly to non-finance stakeholders.
- Experience managing and developing remote finance teams across diverse cultures.

First 12-Month Priorities include implementing intercompany agreements and transfer pricing documentation, standardizing accounting policies, accelerating monthly closes, delivering driver-based budgets and rolling forecasts, launching management reporting packs, establishing site-level P&Ls, managing cash forecasts and funding, enforcing inventory policies, completing control self-assessments, closing out exited markets, and setting up franchise finance models ahead of franchise signings.