If you only get to sequence your first three finance hires once, get the Financial Controller in first, then an FP&A Manager, then a Financial Accountant to hold the base. Building in that order gives you a clean close, a forward view, and a stable transactional layer, in the sequence that actually frees up your week.
What follows is an anonymised account of how one CFO at a 45m turnover SaaS business built the layer below them. The numbers and shape are real to the situation. The names are not.
Where did the function start?
The business had grown from 12m to 45m ARR in three years. The CFO had joined at 20m and inherited a single Finance Manager plus an outsourced bookkeeping arrangement.
That setup worked at 20m. At 45m it did not.
The month end close was taking 18 working days. Board packs were being built the night before. The CFO was personally reconciling deferred revenue, which for a SaaS business is the one thing you cannot get wrong.
The brief was simple. Stop being the most senior person doing the reconciliations.
Why did the Financial Controller come first?
The temptation was to hire an FP&A person straight away, because the board wanted better forecasting. The CFO resisted that.
The reasoning was honest. You cannot forecast on numbers you do not trust. If the actuals are wrong, the model is just a well presented guess.
So the first hire was a Financial Controller. The mandate was ownership of the close, the balance sheet, and the audit relationship. Within two months the close moved from 18 days to 9. Within five months it hit 6.
The Controller also rebuilt the deferred revenue process so it ran monthly rather than in a quarterly panic. That single change took the riskiest task off the CFO's desk.
The test for this hire was not technical brilliance. It was whether they could impose a rhythm and hold people to it. That is what a good Controller does.
Why an FP&A Manager second, not a Head of Finance?
With the actuals stable, the CFO turned to the forward view. The board wanted scenario planning around a Series C raise, and the CFO wanted a proper three statement model rather than a spreadsheet held together by memory.
A Head of Finance was considered and rejected. At 45m, with a strong Controller already in place, a Head of Finance would have created an awkward reporting layer and duplicated ownership. The gap was analytical, not managerial.
So the second hire was an FP&A Manager. The remit was the operating model, cohort and retention analysis, and the board pack narrative.
This is where the SaaS specifics mattered. The CFO hired someone who understood net revenue retention, CAC payback, and the difference between bookings, billings, and recognised revenue. Generalist FP&A would have needed six months to learn that language.
By month four the FP&A Manager owned the board pack end to end. The CFO reviewed it rather than built it.
Why did the Financial Accountant come last?
By this point the Controller was carrying too much. They owned the close, the audit, and the day to day transactional processing, which meant they were still doing work that a more junior person should own.
The third hire was a Financial Accountant sitting under the Controller. This person took the accounts payable, accounts receivable, reconciliations, and the first draft of the monthly file.
That freed the Controller to focus on technical accounting, the audit, and controls. It also gave the function something it had lacked entirely, which was a succession layer.
The order matters here. Hiring the Accountant first would have left them unmanaged and pointed at a broken process. Hiring them third meant they walked into a defined close with a Controller to report to.
What did the finished shape look like?
Eighteen months in, the CFO had a three person function under them. Controller owning the close and controls. FP&A Manager owning the forward view. Financial Accountant holding the transactional base and reporting to the Controller.
The CFO's week changed completely. Less reconciling, more capital strategy and commercial partnering. That was the entire point.
If you are mapping a similar build, we work with finance leaders on exactly this sequencing at Harper May, and you can see the kind of people who fill these roles on our live roles.
Common questions
Should I always hire a Controller before FP&A?
In most cases yes, if your actuals or close are not trusted. Forecasting on shaky actuals wastes a good FP&A hire. If your close is already clean and the gap is genuinely forward looking, you can flip the order.
When does a Head of Finance make sense instead?
When you need a genuine management layer between you and multiple teams, usually past 60m to 80m turnover or when the function has grown beyond four or five people. Below that, a strong Controller plus FP&A Manager usually covers it without an extra reporting tier.
How long should this whole build take?
Allow roughly 12 to 18 months across three hires. Rushing all three in one quarter tends to create unmanaged people and unclear ownership. Sequencing lets each hire land before the next arrives.
