Director, Client Finance
What You’ll Do
The 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 Life
Deliverables
- 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
Client Responsibility
- 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
Internal Collaboration & Leadership
- 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
Business Development
- 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
Other duties may be assigned to help drive deliverables within this role.
What You Must Have
Education and Experience
- 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
Skills and Competencies
- 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
What You Might Have, but Isn’t Required
- 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 Requirements
- Travel within the US as necessary, based on project and organizational needs (<10% travel expected)
The Team You’ll Work Closest With
As Director of Client Finance, you will sit within the Finance organization and serve as a critical cross-functional partner across Vaniam Group. You will work most closely with the CFO, Operations leadership, and service line leaders across Client Services, Scientific Communications, and Curio Science, as well as project management and systems teams to ensure financial data flows accurately and efficiently across the organization.