Location: Remote, UK (registered office in London)
Salary: £85,000–£90,000 depending on experience
Type: Permanent preferred; interim considered
Hours: Full-time, or three days a week for the right person

This is a Financial Controller role in everything but the title. A private equity-backed online retail group is looking for a qualified accountant to take complete ownership of finance — not to inherit a working function, but to build one.

The business has grown quickly and finance has not yet caught up with it. There is transactional processing happening, there are numbers being produced, and there is nobody qualified sitting above either. What the group needs is someone who will own the close, put a control framework around it, and become the person the leadership team asks when they want to know what the numbers actually mean.

It suits a Finance Manager ready to make the step up to Financial Controller, or an existing FC who wants the autonomy of building something rather than maintaining it. If you are looking for a well-established function with documented processes and a team beneath you, this is not that role — and the people who will enjoy it most are the ones for whom that is the appeal.
The Role

You will be the senior finance presence in the business, working alongside a fractional CFO who is joining to cover investor reporting, forecasting and the board relationship. That split matters: the strategic layer is covered, which means your remit is the operational and technical one — the close, the balance sheet, the controls and the reporting that everything else depends on.

Expect the first three months to be about establishing what is actually true — reconciling what has not been reconciled, working out where the numbers come from, and putting a close timetable in place that people outside finance understand and follow. The interesting work starts after that.