Senior Finance Data Governance Consultant (Contract)

Quick Facts

Role: Senior Finance Data Governance Consultant (Contract)

Duration: 12 month temporary assignment

Description

12-month temporary assignment to establish and operationalize Finance Data Governance capability across Finance and Technology. The role defines governance standards, documents critical Finance data and lineage, establishes data quality controls, governs master data and hierarchies, and supports priority Finance data products.

Responsibilities

Establish the Finance Data Governance Foundation

• Assess current maturity of Finance data governance, documentation, ownership, controls, and data management practices.
• Design and implement a practical Finance Data Governance operating model, including roles, decision rights, governance forums, workflows, escalation paths, and operating cadences.
• Create governance standards, procedures, templates, decision logs, issue-management routines, and approval processes that Finance and Technology teams can use.

Build the Finance Data Inventory and Business Glossary

• Identify and inventory priority Finance data domains, systems, tables, reports, interfaces, data products, calculations, mappings, and critical data elements.
• Document business definitions, ownership, stewardship, approved usage, security classification, refresh frequency, and downstream dependencies.
• Resolve conflicting definitions across Accounting, FP&A, management reporting, statutory reporting, and regional Finance teams.
• Prepare metadata for publication in an enterprise data catalog and establish workflows for maintaining, reviewing, approving, and retiring governance documentation.

Document Data Lineage and Finance Transformation Logic

• Map data from source systems through integration, transformation, consolidation, reporting, and analytical consumption.
• Document business rules, transformation logic, mappings, allocations, eliminations, adjustments, currency translation, and reconciliation points.
• Identify manual transformations, uncontrolled spreadsheets, duplicated logic, missing ownership, and lineage gaps; support impact assessments for upstream changes.
• Partner with technical teams to distinguish business lineage from physical and technical lineage.

Establish Data Quality and Financial Data Controls

• Define practical Finance data quality standards, rules, thresholds, monitoring requirements, and acceptance criteria.
• Build a data quality rule inventory and support issue identification, triage, root-cause analysis, ownership, remediation, escalation, and closure.
• Develop data quality scorecards and maintain traceable and auditable evidence for approvals, exceptions, reconciliations, and remediation activities.

Govern Finance Master Data and Hierarchies

• Document and govern Finance master data, reference data, mappings, and hierarchies (accounts, cost centers, profit centers, entities, products, regions, currencies, scenarios, reporting periods).
• Define ownership, approval, versioning, effective dating, and change-control requirements.
• Partner with master-data and technology teams on hierarchy-management and Master Data Management initiatives, including business requirements, process design, testing, and downstream-impact assessment.

Support Priority Finance Data Products

• Apply governance standards to priority Finance data products and procedures.
• Support documentation and validation of SAP financial and consolidation data, including ACDOCA and ACDOCU where applicable.
• Help document data flows and reconciliation requirements across SAP, consolidation and reporting platforms, Snowflake, Domo, planning tools, and downstream reports.
• Support development of governed enterprise context and semantic layers for reporting, analytics, and AI-enabled Finance use cases.

Drive Adoption and Manage Delivery

• Facilitate workshops, prepare executive-ready updates, develop training materials, and coach data owners and stewards.
• Translate complex Finance and technical concepts into clear documentation and decisions.
• Establish a repeatable onboarding approach for new data domains and data products.
• Promote governance as an enabler of faster, more reliable reporting and analytics.
• Develop and maintain a prioritized governance backlog with defined owners, deliverables, dependencies, and completion criteria.
• Work independently, identify missing requirements, and move ambiguous work toward resolution.

Required Qualifications

• Eight or more years of experience in data governance, Finance data management, Finance transformation, financial systems, data quality, metadata management, or related consulting roles.
• Demonstrated experience establishing or materially improving a data governance and data strategy capability in a complex enterprise.
• Strong understanding of Finance processes, including general ledger, management reporting, financial consolidation, planning, forecasting, close, and reconciliation.
• Experience documenting financial data definitions, business rules, mappings, hierarchies, lineage, controls, and data quality requirements.
• Experience partnering with Finance, Accounting, FP&A, data engineering, business intelligence, security, and enterprise technology teams.
• Ability to distinguish business ownership and governance responsibilities from technical platform and engineering responsibilities.
• Strong facilitation skills and ability to drive decisions across stakeholders with different priorities.
• Demonstrated ability to create detailed, usable deliverables with limited existing documentation or structure.
• Strong written communication skills for both detailed working documentation and executive-level summaries.
• Experience working in consulting, transformation, or contractor environments with measurable deliverables and knowledge transfer.
• Ability to operate independently in an ambiguous, fast-moving, greenfield environment.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with SAP S/4HANA Finance and related financial data structures for consolidation/group reporting (e.g., ACDOCA, ACDOCU).
• Experience with cloud data platforms, enterprise analytics/reporting tools, and data governance/catalog platforms (e.g., Snowflake, Tableau, Power BI, Domo, Atlan, Collibra, Purview, or similar).
• Strong understanding of data quality and architecture, including SQL, data profiling/reconciliation, dimensional modeling, semantic layers, hierarchies, and modern data architectures.
• Experience working with Finance data in SOX-controlled or audit-sensitive environments, including data supporting automation and AI (consulting/Finance transformation/enterprise data advisory experience preferred).

Benefits

• Medical, dental, and vision benefit offerings.
• Estimated base pay range: $129,600—$194,400 USD.