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 …
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 — …
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 the fastest-growing of the in-house tax specialisms and the one businesses most consistently under-resource. It sits awkwardly between finance, payroll, HR and legal, which means it frequently belongs to nobody until something goes wrong — a status challenge, a benefits error discovered …
Fractional Management Accountant: Does the Model Work?
Most descriptions of this role list responsibilities and tell you nothing about what the job feels like. The reality of management accounting is that it has a shape: the month is not uniform, the first week and the third week are almost different jobs, and …
Fractional Finance Business Partner: The Emerging Model
Fractional finance leadership is well established at the top of the function — part-week Finance Directors and Financial Controllers are now an ordinary way for mid-market businesses to buy senior capability. What is newer, and less well understood, is the same model applied one level …
How Many Finance Business Partners Do You Need?
Businesses building a business partnering capability almost always ask the wrong question first. They ask what a finance business partner does, then hire one, and only later discover that one person cannot meaningfully partner six commercial areas. The better question is the sizing one: how …
Finance Salaries vs Inflation: A 5-Year UK Tracker
Between 2021 and 2026 the UK went through the sharpest inflationary episode in four decades and came out the other side with a pay landscape that looks quite different from the one it entered. For finance professionals the question is simple and rarely answered honestly: …
