A transactional finance team that scales past 100m revenue is built around process ownership, not volume. You do not add heads for every extra invoice. You add roles that remove rework, close the month faster, and give the layer below you room to think.
Most teams break at 100m because they carried a 30m structure too far. The people are good. The design is wrong. This is how to fix the design.
What breaks first when you pass 100m?
The close slows down. That is usually the first sign.
What used to take five days now takes ten, and nobody can tell you exactly why. The truth is that every process was built for one person doing a bit of everything, and that stops working once volume triples.
The second thing that breaks is exception handling. At 30m, one experienced person absorbs every odd supplier query, every mismatched PO, every payroll edge case. At 100m, that person is a bottleneck and a single point of failure.
The third thing that breaks is you. You end up approving payment runs and chasing reconciliations because there is no clean layer to hand them to.
How should you split the transactional function?
Split by process, not by ledger. Ledgers are how the system stores data. Processes are how work actually flows.
The three processes that matter are purchase to pay, order to cash, and record to report. Build a clear owner for each.
Purchase to pay covers accounts payable, supplier onboarding, expenses, and the payment run. Order to cash covers billing, credit control, cash allocation, and collections. Record to report covers bank reconciliations, balance sheet control accounts, and the feed into month end.
Once you name the owners, the handoffs become visible. You can see where work sits, who is accountable, and where a query dies.
What roles do you actually need?
At roughly 50m to 100m, a workable shape is a Financial Controller over the whole transactional and reporting engine, with a Finance Manager owning day to day transactional operations underneath.
Under the Finance Manager you want an AP lead and an AR or credit control lead, each with one or two clerks depending on volume and terms. A dedicated Financial Accountant should own reconciliations and the balance sheet, feeding a clean close.
The mistake is hiring another clerk when the real gap is a lead. Clerks process. Leads own outcomes, catch exceptions, and stop problems reaching your desk.
If you get the leads right, the clerk count you need actually falls, because rework falls.
How do you know if you need people or process?
Run a simple test. Look at where your team spends time and ask whether the work is repeatable or judgement based.
If people are rekeying data, chasing approvals, or fixing coding errors, that is a process and systems problem. More heads just scale the mess.
If people are handling genuine exceptions, negotiating with suppliers, or investigating variances, that is judgement work, and that is where headcount is well spent.
Automate the repeatable. Hire for the judgement. That order matters, because hiring first hides the process debt.
Where does credit control fit as you scale?
Credit control is the function most CFOs under invest in, and it is the one that protects your cash. Past 100m, it deserves its own owner rather than being bolted onto AP.
A good credit control lead is part analyst and part relationship manager. They read the ledger, spot slippage early, and hold difficult conversations without losing the customer.
That role pays for itself in days sales outstanding alone. If your DSO is drifting, that is your signal to prioritise this hire.
How does this free up your week?
The point of the structure is not tidiness. It is to move the transactional load off you and off your reporting layer.
When each process has a named owner, month end becomes a set of owned checklists rather than a scramble. Your Financial Controller reviews rather than does. You review rather than approve line by line.
That is what gives you the space to work on forecasting, board packs, and the commercial questions the business actually needs from you.
If you are building out these roles and want a sense of the market, we work on exactly these mandates at Harper May, and you can see live briefs on our jobs board.
Common questions
When should I promote from within versus hire externally?
Promote when the person has shown ownership and judgement, not just accuracy. A strong clerk does not automatically make a strong lead. If you need new process discipline the team has never had, hire it in and let them raise the bar.
How many people should a transactional team have at 100m?
There is no fixed number, because it depends on transaction volume, payment terms, and system maturity. A well automated business might run leaner than a manual one at the same revenue. Design the processes first, then size the team to the work that remains.
What is the first hire if I only have budget for one?
Hire the lead that removes the most work from you. In most cases that is a Finance Manager or a credit control lead, because both take real ownership off your desk rather than just adding processing capacity.
