Director, Client Finance
Director, Client FinanceWhat You’ll DoThe Director of Client Finance serves as the primary financial liaison between finance and operations, ensuring real-time alignment between project execution and revenue and profitability targets across all clients and service lines. This role is fully AI-enabled — leveraging AI tools, including Claude, to drive efficient, elevated financial delivery across forecasting, reporting, and analysis workflows. The Director brings deep systems expertise and a continuous improvement mindset, serving as Vaniam’s internal authority on the intersection of its operational and financial platforms.A Day in the LifeDeliverables
- Own and continuously improve the end-to-end project forecasting process, partnering with operations to validate assumptions, challenge outliers, and ensure accurate forecasting
- Develop forward-looking indicators that give leadership earlier signals on revenue trends and risk
- Produce monthly variance analysis that explains the “why” behind actual-to-budget and actual-to-forecast variances in order to drive corrective action
- Oversee monthly revenue recognition, invoicing, and project reconciliation process to ensure timely close and project closeout
- Partner with operations in pricing builds and strategy, as well as portfolio profitability analysis
- Support the CFO in strategic deliverables required for executive reporting and various other ad hoc reporting requests from leadership
- Own the Power BI reporting layer for project analysis, building and maintaining dashboards that deliver self-service insights to operations, finance, and executive leadership
- Apply AI-enabled tools, including Claude, to accelerate variance analysis, automate recurring reports, and surface financial insights faster — this is a core expectation of the role
- Evaluate and recommend system improvements, integrations, or new tools that close gaps in Vaniam’s reporting and analytics infrastructure
- Serve as the go-to financial partner for operations, embedding financial discipline into project planning, staffing decisions, and scope management
- Translate operational metrics into easy-to-digest information to improve and drive growth outcomes
- Drive alignment between project management systems (Workfront), CRM (Salesforce), and financial systems (Sage Intacct/Vena) to eliminate reconciliation friction and ensure a single source of truth
- Lead cross-functional reviews of project performance with client and service line leaders, bringing data-driven insights that inform strategy, pricing, and resourcing
- Use AI tools to model scenarios, stress-test financial assumptions, and prepare leadership-ready outputs more efficiently
- Assess project needs and challenges; identify and implement solutions to meet productivity, quality, and financial goals
- Assess, redesign, and implement project analysis workflows that are scalable, repeatable, and audit-ready
- Lead organizational adoption of new tools and processes, including AI-enabled platforms
- Establish and maintain SOPs for project forecast updates and financial reporting, ensuring consistency as the organization evolves
- Serve as Vaniam’s subject matter expert on how project, financial, and CRM systems interconnect, understanding the data architecture well enough to diagnose issues, design solutions, and advise on system enhancements
- Lead, mentor, and develop a team of project analysts, setting clear performance expectations and creating pathways for professional growth
- Build a high-accountability team culture rooted in intellectual curiosity, analytical precision, proactive problem-solving, and AI enablement
- Manage team capacity and priorities to balance recurring deliverables with strategic projects and ad hoc leadership requests
- Model and promote AI fluency across the team, embedding AI tools into day-to-day workflows and establishing best practices for their use
- Leverage Claude and other AI-enabled tools to accelerate analysis, automate repetitive reporting tasks, and enhance insights
- Ensure that financial work is of the highest quality and instills confidence across leadership and operational stakeholders
- Partner with operations and service line leaders to identify opportunities for margin improvement, pricing optimization, and revenue growth
- Contribute analytical rigor to new business proposals, renewals, and client profitability strategy
- Champion a culture of continuous improvement, with an eye toward AI integration at every stage of the financial workflow
- Bachelor’s degree in Finance and/or Accounting
- 8–12 years of progressive experience in financial/project analysis, FP&A, or operations finance within an agency, CRO, professional services firm, or other project-based environment
- Minimum 3 years of direct people leadership with a demonstrated track record of developing analysts into high-performing contributors
- Exceptional communication skills with the ability to translate complex financial and operational data into clear, compelling narratives for non-financial audiences
- Proven success improving forecast accuracy and building repeatable, scalable forecasting processes in a multi-service-line or multi-entity environment
- Demonstrated change management expertise requiring organizational buy-in, training, and sustained adoption
- Expert-level proficiency with Power BI (building dashboards, DAX, data modeling) and advanced Excel (financial modeling, complex formulas, pivot tables, macros)
- Demonstrated fluency with AI-enabled tools, specifically Claude AI, for analysis, reporting automation, and workflow acceleration — candidates should be active, confident AI users, not beginners
- Strong understanding of project-based revenue recognition, utilization/realization metrics, and professional services financial dynamics
- High comfort level with AI tools and a growth mindset toward adopting new technologies as they evolve
- Ability to operate with autonomy and strong judgment in a fully remote, distributed environment
- Strong analytical instincts with a bias toward action and continuous improvement
- Collaborative by nature, with the ability to build trust quickly across finance, operations, and executive stakeholders
- Effective communicator who can present complex financial information clearly to non-financial audiences
- CPA, MBA, or CMA designation
- Strong working knowledge of Vena (or comparable FP&A/CPM platforms), Workfront (or comparable project management systems), Salesforce, and Sage Intacct (or comparable ERP/GL systems)
- Experience in life sciences, pharma/biotech services, or medical communications environments
- Familiarity with retainer/subscription-based revenue models and associated metrics
- Background in building or significantly improving analytics and reporting infrastructure from a fragmented starting point
- Travel within the US as necessary, based on project and organizational needs (