The Three Lines of Defence, Explained for Finance Teams
A newly appointed financial controller at an authorised firm is told in their first week that finance is “first line”. Nobody explains what that means, and asking feels like admitting to a gap that ought to have been filled years ago. Six months later the …
When Compliance and Finance Report Different Numbers
A board pack arrives containing two figures for redress paid in the quarter. The compliance report says £184,000. The management accounts say £211,000. Nobody noticed until a non-executive director asked which one was right, and the answer took eleven days to produce. Variations on this …
When Compliance Monitoring Tests Your Finance Function: What Actually Gets Reviewed
Most financial controllers who move into an FCA-regulated firm from unregulated industry discover compliance monitoring in the same way: an email arrives from the compliance officer saying that client money reconciliations are on the monitoring plan for Q2, and asking for a sample of twelve …
What a Finance Function Should Cost: UK Benchmarks by Company Size
“Are we spending too much on finance?” is one of those questions that sounds answerable and turns out not to be, at least not from published sources. The established benchmarking work on finance function cost — APQC’s cross-industry data and its equivalents — is built …
Fractional and Interim Finance in FCA-Regulated Firms
Two of the questions I am asked most often turn out to be the same question. The first comes from small authorised firms: “we cannot justify a full-time financial controller, but we are regulated — can we use someone part-time?” The second comes from experienced …
The New Late Payment Rules: What Your Finance Function Needs to Change
Here is a question worth putting to your finance team this week. Without going away to build anything, can they produce a list of every overdue sales invoice, showing the correct contractual due date for each, the number of days it is overdue, and the …
The Autumn Finance Hiring Window
Finance recruitment has a shape to its year, and the autumn is the busiest and most compressed part of it. Between the first week of September and the middle of December there is a window in which most of the year’s remaining permanent finance appointments …
What an Unfilled Finance Seat Actually Costs
A vacant finance role is one of the few business costs that does not appear anywhere in the management accounts. The salary line shows a saving. The recruitment budget is untouched. Nothing in the reporting says the seat is empty — which is precisely why …
Why Your Financial Controller Search Has Stalled
A finance search that has been open for three months is rarely stalled for the reason the business thinks it is. The usual explanation offered is that “there is nobody out there” — and while candidate scarcity is real in some disciplines, it is the …
Senior Finance Manager to SMF16/17: What to Ask
A growing number of the Senior Finance Manager and Financial Controller briefs we handle at Accountancy Capital now carry the same feature: the role is advertised as a stepping stone to a Senior Management Function, usually SMF16 (Compliance Oversight) or SMF17 (Money Laundering Reporting Officer), …
