Senior Finance Manager to SMF16/17: What to Ask
Some 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), once a …
Consumer Duty Two Years On: What Finance Teams Learned
The Consumer Duty has applied to products and services open to sale or renewal since 31 July 2023, and to closed products and services since 31 July 2024. It is now more than three years since it first applied and more than two since it …
Why Regulated-Firm Finance Roles Pay a Premium
A Financial Controller in an FCA-authorised firm typically earns 15–25% more than one doing comparable work in a commercial business of the same size. The gap is not a market quirk and it has not compressed over time. It exists because the experience can only …
Pricing Your Fractional Finance Work: A Practical Guide
Pricing is the part of fractional practice that finance professionals handle worst, which is an irony worth noting. People who spend their working lives on margin analysis routinely set their own rate by taking their former salary, dividing by 220 and adding a bit — …
Becoming a Fractional Financial Controller: A Guide
Fractional financial control has become a genuine career rather than a stopgap between permanent roles. Businesses of roughly £3m to £30m revenue — most often £3m to £15m — increasingly want senior finance capability one or two days a week, and the experienced Financial Controllers …
What a Fractional FC Achieves in the First 90 Days
Businesses engaging a fractional Financial Controller for the first time usually have a clear problem — the numbers are late, or not trusted, or nobody senior is accountable for them — and much less clarity about what should actually change and how quickly. That vagueness …
The Regulated Finance Hiring Market: H2 2026
Finance hiring inside FCA-authorised firms behaves differently from the wider qualified market. The pools are smaller, the premiums are structural rather than cyclical, and demand is driven by regulatory obligation as much as by growth — which means it holds up in conditions where commercial …
R&D Tax and Patent Box: Hiring the Right Capability
R&D tax relief and Patent Box are the two UK incentives most likely to be worth real money to an innovative business and least likely to have a clear owner inside it. Both sit between finance, tax and the technical teams who actually do the …
Employment Tax: When to Hire a Specialist In-House
Employment tax is one of the fastest-growing in-house tax specialisms and one of the most consistently under-resourced. It sits awkwardly between finance, payroll, HR and legal, which means it often belongs to nobody until something goes wrong: a status challenge, a benefits error found across …
SaaS Metrics for Management Accountants: ARR, NRR, CAC
Management accountants moving into SaaS discover quickly that the P&L is the least interesting page in the pack. The board reads ARR, net revenue retention, CAC payback and gross margin, and expects finance to own those numbers with the same rigour as the statutory ones. …
