Do you feel like your next career move might be into a controller position? Are you ready? Working as a controller means taking on a leadership role within the finance department. You analyze, develop and provide key financial information with a focus on future performance. Although every controller job is different, there are skills you need to advance in your career. These are eight of the top skills you need to be a successful controller.
1. Know the Company – In your controller position, you need clear knowledge of what your company does and how it is organized. You must thoroughly understand company culture, structure, and length of time needed to make decisions. Are there roadblocks to existing processes, or roadblocks to creating new ones? Are you fully aware of office politics that could play a role in getting things done?
2. Understand Company Transaction Processes – Because you work as a controller, you own company transaction processes. You must understand accounts payable, accounts receivable, payroll, T&E, and general accounting. You may also use automation and transformation methods such as procure to pay (P2P) and order to cash (O2C) to streamline processes. Will your software systems as well as your human systems support you in analyzing and potentially identifying gaps or opportunities for improvement?
3. Control Costs – As a controller, you must develop policies and procedures, systems, processes and metrics to ensure costs are limited. For instance, when the company begins a major project, you need to implement a cost control process to monitor cost performance, ensure changes are accurately recorded, and prevent unauthorized charges. While “change management” is its own discipline filled with experts, knowing what to watch for and how to handle challenges is knowledge worth having.
4. Implement Internal Controls and Compliance – As a controller, you are responsible for creating and implementing an internal environment. Your team and you design, develop and test each control’s operational effectiveness to ensure it carries out its intended function. If it does not, you’ll need to adjust accordingly. Compliance is another discipline filled with experts, and, if your company has a compliance manager, you’ll want to have an excellent working relationship with that person. If there’s not a compliance manager, it will be up to you to be aware of compliance requirements and ensure your organization operates within them for the areas you can control.
5. Improve Financial Reporting – In your role as a controller, you must continually search for ways to streamline the fiscal closing process. For instance, you may implement automation to improve accuracy and efficiency. You must also analyze company accounts and ensure everything is accurately reported. In most cases you are ultimately responsible for the accuracy of the financial statements. Before you start a new process, analyze what’s in place already. You may be able to make small, incremental changes over time that will be easy for the company to handle while yielding substantive change over time.
6. Increase Efficiency – As a controller, you always should be looking for ways to improve efficiency in corporate transaction processes. You may implement automation or process efficiencies. You might combine similar processes into a shared services organization or replace manual invoicing with e-invoicing. Regardless of the specifics it is your responsibility to always be looking efficiencies in all processes. This is another area where small, incremental changes can yield big changes over time. Assess the company’s appetite – and ability to handle – change. You might be able to do a big change, or it might take baby steps to get where you need to go.
7. Use Analytics and Metrics – Working as a controller, you may develop and implement metrics to determine how well your business processes are working, where improvements were implemented successfully, which areas have problems and how you can solve them. Share your findings with the management team. Can you move something one inch in the right direction by making a small improvement? As we said above, frequently it’s easier to make small changes over time than one or a series of big changes all at once.
8. Develop and Maintain Business Partnerships – As a controller, you must identify your areas of influence to ensure you develop strong relationships or partnerships with leaders in departments such as IT, Legal and HR. It’s likely you’ll be looking at the metrics for all of these areas, you’ll want strong partnerships so you can make decisions together.
Ready to Step Up?
To be successful in your controller role, you must be analytic, organized and precise as well as detailed, factual and accurate. You need to analyze, interpret and share financial information with executives and other departments to advance in your career.
When you are looking for your next controller job, partner with Ambrion. Gain access to our network of industry-leading companies, real-life interview advice, and marketing beyond your resume. Contact us today!