Manager – Commercial Finance & Operations

About hoichoi

hoichoi is India's leading Bengali OTT platform and the digital arm of SVF — Eastern India's largest media & entertainment company. With 650+ Bengali films, 185+ originals, and 3,000+ hours of content, we serve a global audience of ~250 million Bengalis across 190+ countries. Part of the wider SVF ecosystem alongside Sooper and LoglineAI, we are a ~75 person team with the ambition and reach of a much larger organisation.

What You'll Do

Production & Vendor Payment Management

• Own the end-to-end production payment cycle — scheduling, processing, and tracking payments for content production, brand projects, and vendor engagements.
• Manage payment deferment decisions in consultation with relevant stakeholders — balancing cash flow with production continuity.
• Negotiate payment terms with vendors and production partners; ensure commercially favourable terms without disrupting relationships.
• Establish and maintain a structured weekly payment release cadence.
• Track all payment requisitions against approved budgets before release; flag overruns in real time.

Cost Optimisation & Budget Ownership

• Departmental budget tracking across functions — monitoring actuals vs. plan on a monthly basis and flagging variances to leadership.
• Lead cost optimisation initiatives across departments — identifying inefficiencies, renegotiating vendor and service contracts, and driving measurable savings.
• Manage commercial relationships — vendor management, maintenance cost control, and capex vs. opex classification.
• Partner with department heads to build annual budgets that are grounded in operational reality, not just financial targets.

Commercial & Vendor Relationship Management

• Be the primary commercial interface for key vendors, service providers, and real estate counterparts — maintaining strong, professional relationships while holding firm on commercial terms.
• Drive contract renewals, rate negotiations, and SLA discussions across vendor categories.
• Work closely with teams to ensure commercial agreements are aligned with business requirements.

Finance Operations & Reporting

• Oversee payment gateway collections and ensure accurate reconciliation — including pro-rated accounting for annual subscription plans and Sale vs. Collection reconciliation.
• Ensure content amortization is tracked and recorded accurately across daily, monthly, and yearly schedules.
• Work with the tech and data teams to support automation of repetitive finance workflows — including Juspay-to-Zoho Books integration and AI-assisted MIS — without being solely responsible for building these systems.
• Maintain books in Zoho Books with accuracy and timeliness; evaluate additional tools where relevant.

What are we looking for :

• 4–8 years of experience in a finance role with clear exposure to commercial finance, vendor management, production payments, or cost operations — not purely transactional accounting.
• Demonstrated ability to manage payment cycles, negotiate vendor terms, and own budget tracking across multiple departments.
• Strong working knowledge of Zoho Books or a comparable accounting platform — hands-on, not just supervisory.
• Experience managing real estate or facility commercial relationships is an advantage.
• Commercially sharp communicator — able to hold firm in negotiations while maintaining productive relationships.
• Comfortable with AI tools and basic finance automation concepts; expected to adopt and direct automation, not necessarily build it.

Why Join hoichoi

• You'll have a direct line to the leadership and functional heads — no layers, no slow approvals. Every initiative you lead has visible, measurable impact on a product used by millions of Bengalis worldwide.
• You'll work at the intersection of AI, media, and culture at a moment when all three arechanging fast. The SVF ecosystem alongwith hoichoi + Sooper + LoglineAI gives you afrontrow seat — and an active role — in how AI reshapes storytelling and entertainment.
• You'll build something enduring: the AI playbooks and infrastructure you create here will shape how the organisation operates for years.

Culture & How We Work

At hoichoi, the best idea wins, not the biggest title. We operate in small, crossfunctional teams where content, product, growth, and tech sit close together, argue productively, and occasionally steal each other's snacks. It's a lot like a kitchen during a house party: slightly chaotic, everyone's doing three things at once, but somehow the food comes out great.

Ownership here isn't a buzzword; it's the default setting. If something's broken, you don't file a ticket and wait. You're the person who notices the printer is jammed and just fixes it instead of pretending you didn't see it.

We ship fast, measure what works, and iterate. When big moments arrive, we stretch.But we're equally serious about keeping the pace sustainable,because burnout teams build neither great products nor great stories. If that sounds like your kind of chaos, we should talk.