Lead SAP FICO Consultant

The consultant will combine deep hands-on AR and SAP FI expertise with functional team leadership, partnering with finance stakeholders, solution architects, technical teams, and cross-functional workstreams to deliver scalable solutions, govern quality, mentor consultants, and drive successful project outcomes.

• Engage with finance and business stakeholders to understand Accounts Receivable, customer accounting, collections, cash application, credit, dispute, dunning, and period-end requirements.

• Plan and facilitate requirement-gathering workshops; document current-state and target-state processes, business rules, pain points, controls, and acceptance criteria.

• Perform fit-to-standard and gap analysis, recommend process improvements, and define practical SAP FI solutions aligned with business objectives and accounting controls.

• Translate approved requirements into process designs, configuration documents, functional specifications, and traceability artifacts.

• Design and configure SAP FI capabilities with Accounts Receivable as the primary focus, including customer master and Business Partner settings, account groups, number ranges, posting controls, payment terms, dunning, incoming payments, clearing, residual and partial payments, reason codes, correspondence, and account determination.

• Provide senior-level expertise across complex AR scenarios including lockbox, electronic bank statement integration, cash application, refunds, credit memos, down payments, customer statements, intercompany receivables, write-offs, dispute handling, collections, and month-end reconciliation.

• Configure and support General Ledger, Accounts Payable, Asset Accounting, Bank Accounting, taxes, currencies, document splitting, validations, substitutions, and financial closing where required for an integrated FI solution.

• Map finance processes to SAP S/4HANA functionality using standard capabilities wherever appropriate, including Universal Journal, Business Partner, SAP Fiori applications, and modern reporting.

• Collaborate with SD, MM, CO, Treasury, banking, tax, and integration teams to ensure coherent end-to-end process integration, especially order-to-cash postings and customer account settlement.

• Work with developers and integration teams to define functional requirements for enhancements, forms, reports, workflows, interfaces, conversions, APIs, IDocs, and extensions.

• Support finance master-data design and migration activities for Business Partner/customer, G/L accounts, open items, balances, credit data, payment methods, and relevant reference data.

• Prepare test scenarios, test cases, test data, and expected results; execute and support unit, integration, regression, and user acceptance testing.

• Validate AR postings, clearing, aging, reconciliation, dunning, cash application, customer statements, tax, and financial reporting outcomes.

• Analyze defects, identify root causes, coordinate fixes, and validate that solutions meet functional, accounting, control, and business requirements.

• Support cutover planning, open-item migration, reconciliation, deployment readiness, go-live, stabilization, and knowledge-transfer activities.

• Troubleshoot production issues, assess financial and business impact, and coordinate timely resolution with technical and cross-functional teams.

• Act as the functional liaison between finance teams, product owners, project managers, developers, testers, architects, and other SAP workstreams.

• Contribute to project planning, estimates, status reporting, risk and issue management, and delivery of small to medium-sized initiatives.

• Maintain accurate functional documentation, configuration rationale, test evidence, reconciliation evidence, support knowledge, and handover materials.

• Serve as an SAP FI and Accounts Receivable subject-matter expert and provide guidance, peer support, and mentoring to junior team members.

• Work independently while contributing effectively within Agile, hybrid, or structured project delivery models.

• Lead and mentor SAP FI consultants, analysts, and junior team members across implementation, rollout, enhancement, and application-support engagements.

• Own functional workstream planning, estimation, task allocation, prioritization, progress tracking, and coordination of delivery dependencies.

• Provide functional leadership during workshops, solution design, configuration reviews, testing cycles, cutover, go-live, and hypercare.

• Review functional specifications, configuration documents, test scenarios, reconciliation outputs, defect resolutions, and deployment deliverables to ensure quality, consistency, and traceability.

• Act as the functional escalation point for complex AR and SAP FI issues, critical business requirements, and cross-workstream design decisions.

• Drive knowledge sharing, reusable assets, process standardization, continuous improvement, onboarding, coaching, and capability development.

• 10+ years of SAP consulting experience with advanced hands-on expertise in SAP FI, including SAP S/4HANA implementations, rollouts, enhancements, transformation programs, and application support.

• Demonstrated experience designing, configuring, testing, deploying, and supporting end-to-end Accounts Receivable processes as the primary functional competency.

• At least two full-cycle SAP implementation engagements covering requirements, design, configuration, testing, data migration, cutover, go-live, and hypercare.

• Strong functional knowledge of customer accounting, incoming payments, clearing, dunning, cash application, account statements, credit and collections touchpoints, reconciliation, and period-end close.

• Broad working knowledge of General Ledger, Accounts Payable, Asset Accounting, Bank Accounting, tax, and integration with SD, MM, CO, and Treasury.

• Experience preparing business process documents, functional specifications, configuration documents, test scripts, training materials, and user-facing guidance.

• Strong analytical, diagnostic, and problem-solving skills with the ability to convert business needs into clear, controlled, and supportable functional solutions.

• Effective written and verbal communication skills, stakeholder-management capability, and confidence facilitating workshops.

• Demonstrated experience leading an SAP FI functional workstream or team, including planning, estimates, task coordination, quality reviews, mentoring, and stakeholder communication.

• Experience coordinating onshore and offshore team members across multiple functional and technical workstreams.

• Formal SAP training or certification in SAP S/4HANA Financial Accounting.

• Experience with SAP S/4HANA transformation, upgrade, rollout, migration, or Central Finance programs.

• Exposure to SAP Fiori finance applications, SAP Cash Application, FSCM Credit Management, Collections Management, and Dispute Management.

• Experience with banking interfaces, lockbox, electronic bank statements, payment formats, data migration, and custom enhancement delivery relevant to AR.

• Understanding of SAP Activate, Agile/Scrum delivery, solution governance, global delivery models, effort estimation, roadmap definition, presales, or proposal activities.