Financial manager with eleven years in FMCG and retail, currently responsible for a R400m annual budget across four business units. Known for rebuilding reporting processes that people actually use — most recently cutting the group month-end close from fourteen working days to five.
Interview answers
Recorded live during a CVfide interview. Not uploaded, not edited.
Tell me about a time you found an error that no one else had caught.
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In my second year at Meridian I was reconciling store-level stock write-offs and noticed one site was writing off almost exactly 3% of stock every single month. Real shrinkage is noisy — it moves around. A flat number like that meant someone was plugging it. I pulled eighteen months of data and the pattern held. It turned out the branch was using write-offs to absorb a receiving error that had never been fixed, so about R1.4m of stock had been quietly disappearing into that line. I took it to the regional manager with the workings rather than an accusation, because at that point I genuinely did not know whether it was fraud or just a bad process. It was a bad process. We fixed the receiving control and the write-off line dropped to under half a percent.
You reduced month-end close from fourteen days to five. What was the hardest part?
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Honestly, not the accounting — the people. The technical work was consolidating four charts of accounts, which is tedious but well understood. The hard part was that the fourteen days existed because every business unit had built its own workarounds and each one was somebody's job. When you compress the timeline you are telling people the thing they have done carefully for years is now done differently. I spent about six weeks sitting with each team before I changed anything, mapping what they actually did versus what the process document said. Those were quite different. Two of the workarounds turned out to be covering real gaps, so we kept them and built them in properly. If I had gone straight to redesign I would have broken those and lost the room.
How do you handle it when your analysis says one thing and a senior stakeholder wants another?
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I try to separate the number from the decision. My job is to make sure the number is right and that everyone understands what it means, including the uncertainty in it. The decision is often not mine. Where I push hard is when I think someone has misunderstood what the analysis actually says, as opposed to understood it and weighed it differently. Those are very different conversations. During the facility renegotiation our MD wanted to present a best-case working capital position. I did not think that was dishonest, but I thought it was risky, because if the bank stress-tested it we would lose credibility on everything else. So I built both and showed him what the downside case did to our covenant headroom. He went with the conservative one. He might not have, and that would have been his call to make.
Experience
Financial Manager
Mar 2021 — Present
Kalahari Foods Group · Johannesburg
Reduced group month-end close from 14 working days to 5 by consolidating four ledgers onto a single chart of accounts.
Led the finance workstream of an ERP migration covering 340 users, delivered on schedule and 8% under budget.
Built the working-capital model that supported a R95m facility renegotiation, improving terms by 140 basis points.
Senior Management Accountant
Jan 2018 — Feb 2021
Meridian Retail Holdings · Cape Town
Owned budgeting and forecasting for 62 stores with combined turnover of R1.2bn.
Introduced a store-level contribution model that identified 11 loss-making sites, 8 of which returned to profit within a year.
Audit Senior
Feb 2015 — Dec 2017
Deloitte South Africa · Johannesburg
Completed articles across manufacturing, retail and public sector engagements.
Education
CA(SA)
South African Institute of Chartered Accountants
2017
Postgraduate Diploma in Accounting
University of Cape Town
2014
BCom Accounting
University of Cape Town
2013
Skills
IFRS
Financial modelling
Budgeting & forecasting
SAP S/4HANA
Working capital management
Team leadership
Power BI
Interview transcript
Tell me about a time you found an error that no one else had caught.
In my second year at Meridian I was reconciling store-level stock write-offs and noticed one site was writing off almost exactly 3% of stock every single month. Real shrinkage is noisy — it moves around. A flat number like that meant someone was plugging it. I pulled eighteen months of data and the pattern held. It turned out the branch was using write-offs to absorb a receiving error that had never been fixed, so about R1.4m of stock had been quietly disappearing into that line. I took it to the regional manager with the workings rather than an accusation, because at that point I genuinely did not know whether it was fraud or just a bad process. It was a bad process. We fixed the receiving control and the write-off line dropped to under half a percent.
You reduced month-end close from fourteen days to five. What was the hardest part?
Honestly, not the accounting — the people. The technical work was consolidating four charts of accounts, which is tedious but well understood. The hard part was that the fourteen days existed because every business unit had built its own workarounds and each one was somebody's job. When you compress the timeline you are telling people the thing they have done carefully for years is now done differently. I spent about six weeks sitting with each team before I changed anything, mapping what they actually did versus what the process document said. Those were quite different. Two of the workarounds turned out to be covering real gaps, so we kept them and built them in properly. If I had gone straight to redesign I would have broken those and lost the room.
How do you handle it when your analysis says one thing and a senior stakeholder wants another?
I try to separate the number from the decision. My job is to make sure the number is right and that everyone understands what it means, including the uncertainty in it. The decision is often not mine. Where I push hard is when I think someone has misunderstood what the analysis actually says, as opposed to understood it and weighed it differently. Those are very different conversations. During the facility renegotiation our MD wanted to present a best-case working capital position. I did not think that was dishonest, but I thought it was risky, because if the bank stress-tested it we would lose credibility on everything else. So I built both and showed him what the downside case did to our covenant headroom. He went with the conservative one. He might not have, and that would have been his call to make.
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