Client Profile:
Mid-sized engineering components manufacturer supplying to automotive OEMs (annual turnover: ₹170+ Cr)
Challenges:
- Cash flow always under pressure due to high dependency on working capital loans
- No product-level profitability insights; pricing was assumption-based
- Monthly MIS was delayed and Excel-based, leading to reactive decision-making
- Founders lacked visibility into gross margins and plant-wise financial control
CFO Pulse Approach:
🔰 CFO Shield (Stage 1)
- Conducted a 12-month 100% transaction audit to clean up books
- Ensured accurate and consistent classification of direct vs indirect costs
- Fixed accounting inconsistencies across plants
📊 CFO Dashboard (Stage 2)
- Built custom Power BI dashboards showing real-time revenue, margins, cost variances
- Developed plant-wise, product-wise, and customer-wise profitability tracking
- Created a daily cash flow dashboard linked to live bank balances & payables
🔍 CFO Lens (Stage 3)
- Monthly performance review meetings with department heads
- Identified electricity cost inefficiencies → cost-saving project reduced power costs by ~8%
- Improved gross margin monitoring → better control over pricing & discount leakages
🧠 CFO Brain (Stage 4)
- Conducted cash conversion cycle (CCC) analysis → reduced CCC by 21 days
- Strategic move: discontinued one low-margin product line, improving overall GP% by 3.2%
- Built 3-year growth forecast model to guide capex planning
Tangible Impact:
- From ₹10 Cr CC/OD limits → moved to cash surplus status with ₹17 Cr in FDs
- Revenue scaled from ~₹39 Cr to ₹170+ Cr within 3 years (with stronger financial discipline)
- Gross margin improved by 4.8% overall
- Created a culture of data-driven financial decisions across all departments
