Finance & MIS Analyst - Accounting & Financial Reporting - Manufacturing

Position Summary:

The role supports the Accounts and Finance Control function with accurate transaction processing, month-end closing support, and the preparation of recurring and ad-hoc management information reports. Beyond conventional MIS work, the incumbent is expected to actively use AI assistants (Claude, ChatGPT, Copilot and similar) to accelerate data extraction, reconciliation, variance commentary and report drafting - while retaining full ownership of the accuracy of every number published.

This is a hybrid finance-plus-analytics role. The right candidate is comfortable in the ledger, comfortable in a pivoted table, and curious enough to have already experimented with AI tools on their own work.

Key Responsibilities:

Accounts & Transaction Support:

- Support accounts payable, accounts receivable and general ledger activities including invoice verification, three-way matching, vendor/customer account reconciliation and ledger scrutiny.

- Assist in month-end and year-end closing: accrual schedules, prepaid amortization, provision workings, inter-company reconciliation and schedule preparation for audit.

- Maintain supporting schedules for statutory audit, internal audit and tax assessments; respond to auditor queries with traceable working papers.

- Track and validate landed cost, freight, clearing and duty postings against source documents.

MIS Preparation & Reporting:

- Prepare recurring management reports - daily/weekly/monthly - covering spend, cost of production, inventory movement, receivables ageing, payables ageing, budget-versus-actual and cash position.

- Build and maintain the month-end MIS pack for leadership review, including variance analysis with written commentary explaining why a number moved, not merely that it moved.

- Convert ad-hoc management questions into structured data pulls and turn the output into a decision-ready one-pager.

- Maintain report definitions, data lineage and refresh calendars so that every published number can be traced back to its ERP source.

- Identify manual, repetitive reporting activities and propose automation candidates to the Finance Control and IT teams.

AI Tools & Analytical Work:

- Use large language model assistants (Claude, OpenAI/ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot) for document data extraction, summarization of contracts and invoices, drafting variance commentary, formula and query generation, and first-cut anomaly explanation.

- Write clear, structured prompts and iterate on them; build and maintain a small library of reusable prompts for the team's recurring reporting tasks.

- Verify every AI-generated output before use. Numbers, calculations and citations must be reconciled to source before anything reaches a management report. Treat AI output as a draft prepared by a junior, never as a published fact.

- Apply structured analytical techniques - trend analysis, ratio analysis, cohort/ageing analysis, correlation between operational drivers and cost outcomes - to convert raw ERP data into insight.

- Support pilot initiatives in AI-assisted invoice validation, exception reporting and automated commentary, working with the IT team on requirement definition and user acceptance testing.

- Review data confidentiality and the organization's AI usage policy; no restricted financial, vendor, employee or contractual data is to be entered into unapproved or public AI tools.

Qualifications:

Essential:

- CA.

- 3 - 6 years of hands-on experience in accounts, financial reporting or MIS, preferably in manufacturing, process industry or a large multi-entity environment.

Preferred:

- Exposure to a manufacturing or petrochemical/fertilizer cost environment.

- Certification or structured coursework in data analytics, Power BI, or prompt engineering / applied AI.

Technical Skills:

- Advanced Excel: Mandatory - Power Query, pivot tables, INDEX/MATCH, XLOOKUP, SUMIFS, dynamic arrays, chart building.

- ERP: Working experience on Oracle Fusion Cloud ERP or SAP - GL, AP, AR, Inventory, Costing modules in combination of any 2 areas.

- Reporting tools: Knowledge of any Analytics tools is good to have.

- AI assistants: Demonstrable practical use of Claude, ChatGPT or Copilot on real work tasks; structured prompting, output validation, awareness of hallucination risk.

- Document handling: PDF/scanned document data extraction, OCR-assisted workflows is an added advantage.

Behavioral Competencies:

- Accuracy under deadline - close calendars do not move; the numbers must be right the first time.

- Analytical curiosity - asks the second and third question behind a variance rather than reporting the first.

- Communication - explains a financial outcome in plain business language to a non-finance audience.

- Ownership - signs off on their own output; does not pass unverified AI or system output upward.

- Confidentiality and integrity - handles sensitive commercial and financial data appropriately.

- Adaptability - willing to change a long-standing manual process when a better method exists.

Key Performance Indicators:

- On-time delivery of the daily, weekly and monthly MIS calendar.

- Zero material errors or restatements in published management reports.

- Reconciliation and schedule readiness ahead of audit cut-off dates.

- Number of manual reporting activities automated or AI-assisted during the year.

- Turnaround time on ad-hoc management data requests.

- Quality of variance commentary as assessed by the Finance Control lead.