A guide to the roles we place
Roles we place
In a small to medium sized business, a financial controller will be responsible for all day-to-day accounting activities. This will cover everything from ensuring that payrolls are processed, clients invoiced, cash collected and suppliers paid, to production of financial and management accounts. In many smaller organisations, a financial controller may be the most senior finance person and reports directly to the owner/managing director.
As businesses grow there is often a transition from having a reasonably small and junior team of qualified and part-qualified accountants, to needing a more experienced accounting professional. The skills required will vary greatly and will largely depend on the business’s needs at that point in time. The business may need someone with great finance modelling skills, or a more process-orientated individual to ensure all the necessary financial controls are implemented. What is common however, is that such businesses may struggle to cope with the additional cost associated with an appointment at that level and could really benefit from considering a part time or interim Financial Controller or Finance Director.
In some smaller businesses, a finance manager may be the most senior finance role. Generally, the role, experience and responsibilities of a finance manager will be narrower than that of a financial controller, although this can vary widely between different businesses.
As your business grows it may be necessary to have more specialist members of a finance team. Management accountants are generally responsible for providing accounting information to businesses that will allow the directors to understand the performance of the business and make informed decisions.
In larger organisations management accounting roles may be expanded to become finance business partners. The necessary skills for this type of role are different to traditional back office accounting roles and a finance business partner becomes more of a trusted advisor, providing more general commercial advice with less transaction processing.
Many larger businesses, and some more complex smaller businesses, employ internal specialists to ensure that they are applying HMRC tax rules and legislation in the correct, and most beneficial way, for the business.
Financial Analyst
The term financial analyst may mean any number of different things. Generally, if your business requires, or generates, a large volume of financial data, it may be necessary to have specialist financial analysts whose role it is to manage, manipulate, understand and present this data in a way that provides benefit to the business.
Revenue / Payable / Payroll / Procurement / IT / HR teams
When businesses first start up, some important functions may be done on a part-time basis, form part of other roles, or are outsourced to specialist organisations. When the business develops and expands, it may be appropriate to recruit specialists in these areas to ensure that the functions are given the necessary focus. We have associate relationships with other recruiters who specialise in areas such as HR and IT and are more than happy to help put you in contact.
Practice roles
We also place accountants and tax specialists in practice roles as Audit Partners, Audit Senior Managers/Managers, Audit Seniors, Audit Assistants, Personal and Corporate Tax Specialists and Insolvency and Business Recovery Specialists.
Still need help deciding - no problem
As part of our Diagnostics Session, we listen with expertise to understand your goals and to help specify the requirements of each role. We will then qualify candidates using our 5-stage Assessment Process to assess skills and intelligence. We understand the importance of cultural fit as well as technical skills and this is taken into account as part of our process.
We can also help you identify your recruitment requirements by advising on how you could audit the team’s existing skills, abilities, and experience to work out where gaps can be filled by training and support, and where you will need to recruit.
Our bespoke service can find ACA or ACCA qualified accountants, CIMA qualified management accountants and CTA qualified tax professionals, as well as people for newly-qualified, part-qualified and non-qualified roles.
With Artemis Clarke you’ll have an experienced financial recruitment partner who can apply their knowledge and insight from both sides of the hiring fence – we’re finance people ourselves and so we know what good looks like.