Manufacturing finance functions are expected to do more than record transactions; they must supply timely, accurate and decision-relevant information to production, procurement and senior management. This study examines the perceived effectiveness of finance and accounts (F&A) practices in a precision automotive components manufacturer in Jamshedpur, India, using a fifteen-item, five-point Likert questionnaire that covers seven dimensions: financial reporting and accounting controls, taxation and compliance, budgeting and variance analysis, management information system (MIS) and decision support, cost analysis, digital integration and automation, and people and coordination. The research context is built from industry data and a review of recent literature on the digitalisation of management accounting, enterprise resource planning (ERP) and business intelligence, and Industry 4.0 in automotive manufacturing. Descriptive statistics and cross-tabulation are applied to a simulated demonstration dataset of 48 respondent records. The dataset is disclosed as simulated throughout and is intended to illustrate the analytical method, not to evidence the actual performance of any organisation. In the demonstration dataset, financial reporting and accounting controls recorded the highest theme mean (4.17), followed by taxation and compliance (3.98), cost analysis (3.88), people and coordination (3.85), MIS and decision support (3.83), budgeting and variance analysis (3.66) and digital integration and automation (3.49); the overall mean was 3.85. Perceived MIS timeliness differed by role, with managers rating it higher than executives. The paper proposes a phased Finance–Operations MIS dashboard that prioritises data integration, driver-based budgeting and exception-based alerts, and it offers a replicable instrument for future studies with authenticated data.

Keywords: finance and accounts; management accounting; MIS; budgeting and variance analysis; cost analysis; ERP integration; automotive components; Likert questionnaire; India