The finance hires to make, in order

Most finance teams in businesses of a few hundred people were not designed. They accumulated. A bookkeeper was hired at twenty employees and is now a financial controller by tenure rather than training. A management accountant was added when the board started asking for a pack. A financial analyst was hired because a competitor had one. The result is a team whose shape reflects the order in which problems became painful.

There is a better sequence, and it starts further down the org chart than most leadership teams expect.

First: transactional capacity that is genuinely good

Before anything else, the day-to-day has to be handled by people who are accurate and fast at it. Purchase ledger, sales ledger, bank reconciliation, expenses, payroll input. This work is unglamorous, it is the foundation everything above it stands on, and it is the most commonly under-resourced part of the function. When it is weak, every senior person above spends their week correcting rather than analysing, and you are paying qualified salaries for data entry.

The test is whether your controller or finance lead is doing transactional work in the last week of the month. If they are, the next hire is not a senior one.

Second: a financial controller who owns the close

The controller is the most important hire in a finance team of this size, and the one most often filled by promoting the longest-serving person rather than by hiring for the role. What you need is someone who has run a close before, can design a control environment, is comfortable saying no to the commercial side, and will build a checklist rather than carry the process in their head. Qualified, ideally with an audit background, and ideally having done it at the size you are going to be rather than the size you are.

Third: the commercial analyst

Only once the numbers are reliable and on time does an analyst create value. Hired before that point, they spend their first year cleaning data and their second year leaving, because the job they were sold does not exist yet. Hired after it, they are the person who turns a correct set of accounts into pricing decisions, margin analysis, and a forecast the leadership team can argue with productively.

The hire almost everyone makes too early

A full-time CFO. The judgement work a CFO does is real but it is not forty hours a week at this size, and a CFO hired into a function without a working close spends their first year building infrastructure at an executive salary. Get the senior judgement on a fraction of a week, build the function underneath, and hire the executive when the role is genuinely full-time.

• Count how many hours your most senior finance person spends on work that a competent transactional hire could do. That number is the case for the next junior hire.
• Hire the controller for the business you will be in two years, not the one you are in now.
• Do not hire an analyst until the close is reliable. There is nothing for them to analyse.
• Systems ownership needs a named person once you run more than three finance tools, even if it is part of someone's role.
• Write the job specification from the work that is not getting done, not from the title above the gap.

Size, roughly

For a single-entity service or online business of three to five hundred people on a modern cloud ledger, a well-run function is usually a fractional or part-time finance lead, a controller, two to three transactional staff, and one analyst. Teams materially larger than that at this size almost always have a systems problem being solved with headcount. Teams materially smaller are usually running on one person's goodwill and represent a serious key-person risk.