BUSINESS INSIGHTS 03 Oct 2026 3 min read
Six and a half years inside corporate finance, now applied to MSMEs
From our team’s experience: how Mohammed Zaman Shaikh brought financial reporting discipline to a loan portfolio of about ₹700 crore and reduced month-end close from 27 days to 23 days.
Gayatri Associates · Business advisory
CASE STUDY · From our team’s experience
| Client | Large corporates and an NBFC loan book |
|---|---|
| Scale | Loan portfolio of about ₹700 crore |
| Role | Financial Analyst, TCS (2015–17) and L&T Finance (2018–22) |
| Result | Month-end close cut from 27 days to 23 days |
Where the experience comes from
Gayatri Associates, founded by Mr. Divyansh Singh, brings corporate finance experience to MSME advisory. Team member Mohammed Zaman Shaikh spent six and a half years as a Financial Analyst at Tata Consultancy Services and L&T Finance. He holds an MBA in Finance and a B.Com in Accounting and Finance, has passed CFA Level I and is NISM-certified in equity derivatives.
The problem
At TCS he analysed the profit and loss, balance sheet and cash flow statements of large corporate clients. The recurring fault was cash flow statements that did not reconcile with balance sheet movements, so management was reading a cash position that was late and, in places, wrong.
At L&T Finance he was responsible for the analytics on a loan portfolio of about ₹700 crore: month-end close, MIS packs, budgeting, forecasting, variance analysis and asset-quality tracking. The month-end close took 27 days, and work that fell behind was only discovered when the pack was due.
What Zaman did
- Rebuilt cash flow statements so operating, investing and financing flows tied back to the balance sheet, and documented the method.
- Wrote the standard operating procedure for the month-end close: who pulls which data, in what order, with what checks, by which day.
- Set up a weekly team review to track lagging work and backlogs, so nothing waited until month-end to surface.
- Automated management reporting in Excel and Power BI, replacing manual re-keying with linked data.
The results
- Month-end close reduced from 27 days to 23 days, four days earlier every month.
- Cash flow and balance sheet reconciled on a documented method rather than by hand.
- Backlogs visible every week instead of every month, and a ₹700 crore portfolio reported on one consistent set of KPIs.
Why this matters to an MSME
A ₹20 crore trading company or a five-outlet restaurant chain faces the same problems: the owner sees the numbers too late, the cash position does not match the books, and everything depends on one person’s memory.
The fix is the same: a reconciled set of numbers, a written close process and a weekly review that actually happens. Gayatri Associates applies this discipline, built for large institutions, at a scale and price an MSME can use.
Start with a 90-minute Business Clarity Session (₹7,500 + GST).
Gayatri Associates | Clarity | Systems | Growth
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