The Ninety Days Before Your Controller Starts

The Ninety Days Before Your Controller Starts

Short answer: The gap between posting a Controller role and having someone productive in it is usually four to seven months, not the six weeks most companies plan for. Search takes two to four months, ramp takes one to three, and the first close is archaeology rather than accounting. That window is when reporting quietly degrades, and it is almost never budgeted for.

The arithmetic nobody runs

Companies budget the salary. Almost nobody budgets the gap.

Search: two to four months. Longer if you need sector experience, longer again if you need someone who has handled multi-entity or multi-channel work. Controller candidates who are good are usually employed, which means a notice period on top.

Notice: two to four weeks, sometimes longer for senior people.

Ramp: one to three months. This is the part that gets underestimated most. A controller inheriting clean books is productive in weeks. A controller inheriting the situation that caused you to hire them is doing archaeology first, and their first close is slow by definition because they are simultaneously closing the month and learning why the last twelve looked the way they did.

Posted in January, productive in June is normal. Not a worst case.

What actually degrades in the gap

The instinct is that nothing much happens, because the work was already being done by whoever is doing it now. That is usually true for the mechanics and untrue for everything else.

The close stretches. Whoever is covering has another job. Close becomes the thing that happens when there is time, so it drifts from ten days to fifteen to whenever.

Reconciliations get forced rather than performed. This is the one that costs money later. A reconciliation that balances because someone booked a plug is not a reconciliation, and the plug compounds quietly for months.

Judgment calls get deferred. Should this be capitalised or expensed. Is this deferred revenue or recognised. Which channel carries this cost. Nobody wants to make a call that the incoming controller might reverse, so items sit in suspense accounts and the incoming controller inherits a queue.

Decisions get made on stale numbers. The reporting still arrives, just later and with less confidence behind it. Pricing decisions, hiring decisions and inventory commitments get made against a picture that is six weeks old.

The three ways companies cover it, and what each costs

Absorb it internally. The bookkeeper or the office manager or the founder takes it on. Cheapest in cash, most expensive in attention, and it caps out fast because the work needing a controller is precisely the work a bookkeeper is not positioned to do. Watch for the founder quietly doing reconciliations at 11pm, which is a genuine cost even though it never appears on a P&L.

Hire a temp through a staffing agency. Fast to place, expensive per hour, and the person is optimised to keep things moving rather than to improve them. Fine if the books are clean and you need hands. Poor if the reason you are hiring is that the books are not clean.

Bring in a fractional controller function. More expensive per hour than absorbing, cheaper than a bad hire, and the useful difference is that a fractional engagement can fix the structure rather than just operate it. The work done in the gap makes the eventual hire more effective rather than just holding the fort.

None of these is right in every case. What is always wrong is planning as if the gap does not exist.

Use the gap, do not just survive it

The strongest version of this is counterintuitive: the search window is the best time to fix the things a permanent hire would otherwise spend their first six months on.

Chart of accounts. If your reporting requires manual reconstruction each month, that is a structural problem. Fixing it during the search means the new controller arrives to a system that produces the reports rather than one that needs a spreadsheet on top.

The close calendar. Written, dated, with owners. Most companies have this in one person's head. Writing it down is a day of work and it is what makes the handover survivable.

Reconciliation backlog. Every account with an unexplained balance is a question the new hire will have to answer while also doing their actual job. Clearing it beforehand converts their first close from archaeology into accounting.

Documentation of judgment calls. Why revenue is recognised this way, why this cost sits in this account, what the intercompany treatment is. This is the institutional knowledge that walks out the door when someone leaves, and it is worth capturing while whoever holds it is still around.

Do those four and a new controller is productive in weeks rather than months. The gap shortens on the far end even though it did not shorten on the near end.

The question worth asking before you post the role

Sometimes the honest answer at the end of the gap is that the seat looks different than you expected.

Companies discover, having fixed the structure and the close during the search, that what they needed was eight hours a week of senior judgment and a well-configured system, not a full-time controller. Others discover the opposite: that the volume genuinely fills a week and the hire was overdue.

Both answers are fine. What is expensive is committing to a $150,000 to $220,000 fully loaded seat before you know which one you are in, and then discovering the mismatch nine months later.

The useful test is hours. Write down every recurring task the role would own, estimate each honestly, and total it. If it comes to thirty hours a week, hire. If it comes to ten, you have a different problem than a hiring problem.

What to tell your team during the gap

Two things, and both matter more than they sound.

Name a decision owner. Not for the accounting work, for the judgment calls. When something ambiguous comes up and there is no controller, the default is that it waits. Someone needs authority to decide and to be wrong occasionally, or the suspense account becomes the strategy.

Set an explicit reporting expectation. If close will take fifteen days instead of ten during the gap, say so and hold to fifteen. The damage comes from an unstated slip, where everyone still expects the numbers on the tenth and nobody trusts the process when they do not arrive.

Common questions

Can I just wait until the new person starts to fix things? You can, and you will pay for it in their ramp. The first ninety days of a controller's tenure are the most expensive time to do cleanup, because they are learning your business while doing it and they cannot yet tell what is normal.

Is a fractional controller just a temp? The difference is scope. A temp operates the existing process. A fractional engagement usually includes improving it, because that is what the firm is being paid for. If you engage one, be explicit about which you want, since paying senior rates for pure coverage is poor value.

What if I need someone urgently and cannot wait four months? Then the honest options are internal absorption with a hard reporting-expectation reset, or fractional coverage. Rushing the search to fill a seat quickly is the most expensive of the three, because a mis-hire at this level costs the search twice plus whatever half-finished restructure they leave behind.

How do I know if my books are clean enough that the gap is low risk? Three checks. Does close finish within ten business days. Does every balance sheet account have supporting detail behind it. Can someone other than the preparer explain any number on it. If all three are yes, the gap is a staffing problem. If any is no, the gap is a risk.

Should I tell candidates the books need work? Yes. Good controllers are not scared of cleanup, they are scared of being surprised by it after they accept. Being straight about the state of things filters for the people who actually want the job you have.

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FynScale covers the controller function during a search, including the structural work that makes the eventual hire more effective. If you are about to post the role, that is usually a short conversation worth having first.