Sutharsan Ramachandran

upervised a finance team of 2 direct reports, delivering accurate monthly management accounts including P&L, balance sheet, and key performance indicators. Produced and distributed comprehensive management reporting packs for internal stakeholders and group reporting requirements.

Led the month-end, quarter-end, and year-end close processes, ensuring timely and accurate financial reporting. Partnered with external auditors and accountants to support statutory accounts preparation and year-end filings.

Oversaw core finance operations including Accounts Payable, payroll, expense management, and purchase ledger, ensuring robust controls and compliance with internal policies and regulatory requirements, including timely VAT submissions.

Managed financial planning activities including budgeting, forecasting, cash flow management, and Work-in-Progress (WIP) tracking. Provided financial insight and commercial guidance to operational teams to support decision-making across two business units.

Acted as main finance lead for acquisition due diligence, serving as primary point of contact across finance, legal, internal stakeholders, and external advisors. Led both financial and legal due diligence workstreams end-to-end, coordinating all information requests and deliverables. Developed 5-year financial forecasts, budgets, and strategic financial models, providing critical insight for board-level decision-making.

Supported revenue recognition processes, including deferred and accrued income accounting, ensuring accuracy and compliance with accounting standards. Assisted senior leadership with financial analysis and strategic projects.

Developed and maintained strong working relationships with department heads and senior stakeholders, improving the efficiency and accuracy of budgeting and financial planning cycles.

Achievements:

• Reduced month-end close process from 14 days to 8 days by implementing a structured close framework.
• Designed and introduced a new management reporting pack, significantly improving visibility of financial performance and decision-making.
• Reduced month-end reporting turnaround from 4 days to 2 days through process improvements and stakeholder alignment.
• Cut budget planning cycle time in half by building strong cross-functional relationships with department heads.
• Developed real-time financial dashboards to improve monitoring of spend against budget.
• Introduced monthly finance review meetings, improving budget control and reducing overspend risk.
• Led end-to-end financial and legal due diligence for an acquisition, acting as primary finance and legal point of contact, coordinating all contracts, workstreams and delivering 5-year forecasts, budgets, and strategic financial models used for board and advisor decision-making.
• Supported acquisition analysis and reporting, ensuring robust financial insight for senior leadership.
• Strengthened financial controls and governance framework, reducing risk and improving compliance.
• Partnered with legal teams to resolve legacy contract issues, ensuring accurate commission obligations and reducing financial risk.
• Improved working capital management through enhanced cash flow forecasting and supplier negotiation.
• Played a key role in audit processes, acting as primary contact for external auditors and ensuring smooth delivery of statutory accounts.

Management Accountant duties: Manage 2 colleagues and 1 direct report to prepare and evaluate monthly management accounts including P&L, balance sheet, and KPI’s. Prepare management packs to distribute both internally and externally to the group and present monthly results to the management team of the individual business units. Business partner with discipline heads to forecast spend monthly and carry out 3 budgets per year for the UK subsidiary. Preparation of information for, and assistance with, annual and interim audit and tax pack. Providing financial support and analysis to the operational teams to ensure profitable business transactions. Management of Account Payable clerks, overseeing and assisting in Purchase Ledger functions and month end close timetable. Ensuring that relevant VAT returns are completed and submitted. Manage the WIP account budgets, reconciliations and create stock when book production is completed. Maintaining revenue schedules for 2 business units, controlling the deferred and accrued revenue.

Achievements

• Reduced month end close from 14 days to 8 days
• Worked with the legal team to understand older contracts entered and ensured relevant commission payment obligations were provided for or paid for, keeping the business’s integrity intact and avoiding penalties
• Successfully built up a good rapport with key stakeholder to ensure a smooth budgeting process and halved the time taken
• Built reports that assists the stakeholder manage their budget and spend effectively
• Introduced monthly stakeholder meetings to manage budget/spend ensuring no overspend
• Liaised with external stakeholder to change the way they report to us in order to improve our accuracy and efficiency enabling us to close the publishing month end process within 2 days from 4 days

Management Accountant duties: Responsible for ensuring the integrity for all the financial ledgers of City Cruises. By accurately and efficiently posting all the daily banking, sales and purchase ledger transactions and making all relevant month and year-end adjustments. Produce the monthly Management Accounts for review by Finance Manager. Ensure all statutory required returns and payments are made according to the required deadlines.

Achievements

• Consistently ensuring monthly accounting information is reported on a timely basis, improving it by 5 days
• Regularly holding meetings with the subsidiary businesses to improve processes for increased accuracy and efficiency
• Coaching the team to record and report information in accordance with the departmental requirements, improving from 8 or more discrepancies/queries to less than 3 per month
• Building a rapport with the team, suppliers and clients enabling consistent contact, updates and more timely payments and increased credit facilities
• Preparing monthly sales invoices in a timely manner, improving receipts, and reducing queries to a point where a debtor meeting is no longer required in the business
• SME for finance transformation project team, helping to successfully develop, deliver and implement a new accounting software from the design stage to UAT and final phase implementation.

Credit Control duties: Actively chasing debt via telephone, email and letter, investigating unallocated cash, statement distribution and forwarding uncovered debts to the legal team to pursue. I was given responsibility to manage key ledgers with invoice values up to £1m ensuring all sales invoice queries are dealt with promptly, in charge of Management Information reporting for the division and reporting aged debtor status to management monthly.

Achievements

• Introduced credit control processes to the 3 ledgers which had not been chased for 12+ months
• Reduced overdue debts by 20% in 3 months
• Built a rapport with the clients enabling consistent contact, updates and more timely payments

Credit control duties: Debt collection [telephone, email and letter], payment allocation, statement distribution, calculating cashback on sales and providing effective query solutions. In addition, aided in finalising management accounts by preparing and inputting journals such as Sales, Trade Partner Accruals & Prepayments.

Achievements

• Reduced debts > 120 days by 80% and debts between 90-119 days by 60%
• Recovered over £50k of debt which was deemed unrecoverable
• Setup a credit check process using Credit Safe, before authorising credit facilities to successfully reduce defaults
• Reviewed customer accounts and amended credit terms and conditions to safely reduce debt and manage risk of deferred and non-payment
• Resolved many disputes with clients and took a handful of cases to the Small Claims Court to recover debts
• Negotiating payment plans
• Managed Chartered Services from invoicing to payment allocation by liaising with multiple stakeholders

Data Analyst duties included day to day management of the online reservation booking system, prices and sailing schedule, analysing sales trends, reporting to senior management, identifying sales opportunities, and creating requirement documents for system development. Monthly sales variations allowed for extra capacity where I assisted the Financial Accountant with month end duties including managing the Fixed Asset Register, deferred income, invoicing and sales reconciliation.

Achievements

• Worked with the system developers to improve the user friendliness by redesigning the website’s user interface
• Wrote requirement documents for new system functionality by reviewing customer and business needs
• Redesigned the format of the uploading spreadsheet reducing turnaround time on average by 50%
• Reduced the booking system crash rate from an average of twice a week to 5 times on average per year by changing the system uploading process
• Redesigned the format and logic of the website’s background data reduce storage usage by over 50% and improved the loading time for customers and the business alike
• Maintained daily trade partner sales records by filling and entering customer vouchers’ data in a practicable manner to increase diligence and decrease lack of evidence when queried
• Managed the process of 3rd party invoicing taking into consideration promotional and special rates at the end of the month and finalised amounts due accurately, reducing receivable days from 56 days to 27 days
• Assisting with deferred income calculation for voucher trade partners (Wowcher, Acorne, Virgin etc)
• Reconciling monthly transactions across two sales ledgers
• Reporting on promotions and discounts to ensure that target profit margins are met
• Processing card payments
• Shrink lessen