Key Responsibilities and Required Skills for Credit Manager

🎯 Role Definition

The Credit Manager leads the credit function to protect company cash flow and minimize credit risk across customers and channels. This role combines hands-on credit assessment, collections leadership, policy design, and collaboration with sales, legal, and finance to establish credit limits, approve accounts, manage delinquent receivables, and report portfolio performance. The Credit Manager balances commercial objectives and risk appetite through data-driven decision-making, robust processes, and continuous improvement of credit scoring, collections strategies, and credit-related controls.

📈 Career Progression

Typical Career Path

Entry Point From:

Senior Credit Analyst / Credit Analyst II
Collections Manager / Accounts Receivable Supervisor
Financial Analyst with credit or commercial experience

Advancement To:

Head of Credit / Credit Director
Chief Financial Officer (CFO) for SMBs or divisional finance lead
Director of Risk Management / VP, Working Capital

Lateral Moves:

Commercial Finance Manager
Head of Collections or Receivables Operations
Risk & Compliance Manager

Core Responsibilities

Primary Functions

Develop, implement and maintain corporate credit policies and procedures, ensuring alignment with company risk appetite, regulatory requirements, and commercial objectives; periodically review and update policies based on portfolio performance and market conditions.
Lead the end-to-end credit decision process including customer onboarding due diligence, credit scoring, financial statement analysis, trade references, and approving or declining credit facilities within delegated authority.
Establish and monitor customer credit limits and payment terms, applying risk segmentation, behavioral scoring, and industry benchmarking to optimize exposure and working capital.
Proactively manage the accounts receivable portfolio by reviewing aged receivables, identifying at-risk accounts, prioritizing collection actions, and directing remediation strategies to reduce DSO and write-offs.
Prepare and present monthly and ad-hoc credit risk reports, portfolio analyses, aging trends, reserves, and forecasts to executive leadership, Finance, and Audit; translate metrics into actionable recommendations.
Supervise, mentor, and develop a distributed credit and collections team (internal and external agencies), set performance targets (KPIs), conduct performance reviews, and deliver training on negotiation, systems and credit policies.
Design and execute collections strategies that include customer segmentation, tailored contact cadences, escalation workflows, legal escalation, and use of collection agencies to maximize recoveries while preserving commercial relationships.
Work cross-functionally with Sales, Legal, Treasury and Customer Service to structure payment plans, contractual credit terms, letters of credit, guarantees, and to resolve commercial disputes affecting receivables and cash collections.
Oversee management of credit insurance, factoring arrangements and third-party recoveries; manage renewals, claims, and coordination with insurers to protect receivables where appropriate.
Conduct in-depth financial analysis and cash flow forecasting for high-risk customers and large exposures, including ratio analysis (liquidity, leverage, profitability) and trend assessments to support account-level decisions.
Implement, configure and optimize credit and collections workflows in ERP and CRM systems (e.g., SAP, Oracle, NetSuite, Salesforce), ensuring data integrity, automation of credit checks, and integration with billing and cash application.
Manage dispute and deduction processes, coordinate with order-to-cash teams to resolve invoice disputes timely, and ensure disputes are minimized through strengthened billing controls and contract clarity.
Lead special projects such as credit system implementations, process automation (AR robotics), continuous improvement initiatives, and deployment of credit-scoring models or machine learning-based risk tools.
Execute portfolio reviews and risk stress-testing (concentration risk, sector exposure), recommending hedging, limits, or strategic account actions to mitigate systemic and single-customer risks.
Approve and manage bad debt provisioning and charge-off processes in accordance with accounting policies and regulatory guidance, working closely with Accounting to ensure accurate reserves and disclosures.
Ensure regulatory, internal control and audit compliance (SOX controls, local credit regulations, data privacy) across all credit and collections activities; drive corrective actions for audit findings.
Negotiate and draft commercial credit terms, payment schedules and settlement agreements; work with Legal to enforce contracts and initiate legal collection action where required.
Maintain accurate, auditable credit files for each customer including credit applications, approvals, financials, correspondence, and risk assessments.
Serve as the primary escalation point for complex credit decisions and high-value disputes; partner with senior leaders during M&A due diligence to assess credit exposures and working capital impacts.
Track and optimize key performance indicators (DSO, days delinquent, recovery rate, promise-to-pay adherence), setting targets and running root-cause analyses to improve collections effectiveness.
Build and maintain strong external relationships with credit bureaus, trade associations, collections agencies, banks and insurers to leverage market intelligence and recovery channels for impaired accounts.
Drive customer experience improvements related to credit and collections by balancing firm credit controls with flexible commercial solutions that support revenue retention.

Secondary Functions

Support implementation and continuous improvement of credit automation, including configuration of credit rules, decision engines, and automated alerts to reduce manual processing and accelerate decisions.
Partner with Data & Analytics to develop dashboards and predictive models (credit scoring, early-warning indicators) and operationalize insights to reduce delinquency and bad debt.
Respond to ad-hoc internal requests for data, scenario modelling and executive briefings required for strategic planning, new product launches, or geographic expansion initiatives.
Participate in cross-functional change programs (ERP upgrades, Order-to-Cash transformation, pricing initiatives) to ensure credit and collection considerations are integrated into project scope and design.
Provide training and best-practice guidance to sales, account management and customer success teams on credit policies, pre-sale credit checks, and escalation protocols.
Maintain up-to-date knowledge of industry best practices, regulatory changes and macroeconomic indicators that could impact customer liquidity and credit risk, and recommend timely adjustments.
Manage relationships with external collection agencies and legal counsel, define KPIs for third-party partners, and oversee recoveries, commissions and compliance of outsourced activities.
Assist Treasury with cash application reconciliations, lockbox processes, and short-term liquidity forecasts to optimize working capital and bank relationship management.

Required Skills & Competencies

Hard Skills (Technical)

Advanced credit analysis and underwriting: financial statement analysis, ratio analysis, cash flow forecasting and covenant assessment for corporate and commercial customers.
Credit risk management: customer segmentation, limit setting, portfolio concentration management, and bad-debt provisioning.
Collections management: negotiation strategies, escalation workflows, legal claims process, and use of third-party collection agencies.
Enterprise systems proficiency: hands-on experience with ERP/AR systems (SAP, Oracle, NetSuite), CRM (Salesforce), and AR automation tools.
Data and analytics: strong Excel modeling (pivot tables, Power Query), experience with SQL and BI tools (Power BI, Tableau) to build dashboards and perform ad-hoc analytics.
Credit scoring and decisioning: design/use of scoring models, rule engines, and integration of bureau/third-party data.
Regulatory and compliance knowledge: SOX controls, data privacy (GDPR where applicable), anti-money laundering (AML) awareness, and local credit regulations.
Financial forecasting and reporting: DSO management, aging analysis, reserve calculations, and executive-level reporting.
Contract and commercial terms review: ability to interpret sales contracts, payment terms, letters of credit, and guarantees.
Project management: experience managing system implementations, process reengineering, and cross-functional initiatives.

Soft Skills

Strong leadership and people-management skills with experience coaching and developing credit and collections teams.
Excellent negotiation and persuasion abilities to recover receipts while preserving customer relationships.
Influential stakeholder management and verbal/written communication skills to partner with Sales, Finance, Legal and Executive teams.
Analytical mindset with attention to detail and the ability to synthesize complex financial information into clear recommendations.
Decisiveness and sound judgment when approving credit or escalating high-risk accounts.
Resilience and persistence in high-pressure collections scenarios; comfort with difficult conversations.
Change agent mindset: continuous improvement orientation and ability to drive operational excellence.
Customer-centric commercial acumen to balance risk mitigation and revenue growth.
Ethical integrity and professionalism handling sensitive financial and customer data.
Time management and prioritization skills to manage a high-volume portfolio and competing escalations.

Education & Experience

Educational Background

Minimum Education:

Bachelor’s degree in Finance, Accounting, Economics, Business Administration or a related field.

Preferred Education:

Master’s degree (MBA, MSc Finance) or professional certifications such as CFA, CPA, CICM (Chartered Institute of Credit Management) accreditation, Certified Credit Executive (CCE) or Certificate in Commercial Credit.

Relevant Fields of Study:

Finance
Accounting
Economics
Business Administration
Risk Management

Experience Requirements

Typical Experience Range:

5–10 years of progressive experience in credit, collections, commercial finance or accounts receivable, with at least 2–4 years in a supervisory or lead role.

Preferred:

7+ years managing credit portfolios and collections teams, experience with multinational customers or multi-currency receivables, proven track record reducing DSO and bad debt, and prior ownership of credit policy development and system implementations.