Key Responsibilities and Required Skills for Business Controller

🎯 Role Definition

The Business Controller is a senior finance professional responsible for controlling, forecasting, and guiding business performance across one or more business units. This role combines technical financial expertise (budgeting, forecasting, consolidation, management reporting) with strong business partnering, actionable commercial insight and process improvement capabilities. The Business Controller ensures timely and accurate financial information to support strategic decisions, drives cost control and margin improvement initiatives, and strengthens internal controls and compliance across the organization.

Core keywords: Business Controller, FP&A, management reporting, forecasting, budgeting, variance analysis, P&L ownership, financial controls, business partnering, financial modelling.

📈 Career Progression

Typical Career Path

Entry Point From:

Senior Financial Analyst / FP&A Analyst with strong forecasting and reporting experience
Management Accountant or Reporting Accountant managing P&L or cost centers
Commercial Finance Business Partner or Project Controller transitioning to a wider remit

Advancement To:

Finance Manager / Senior Finance Manager
Head of FP&A or Head of Controlling
Director of Finance or Chief Financial Officer (CFO)

Lateral Moves:

Commercial Finance Business Partner
Operational Finance Lead or Project Finance Manager
Program/Project Controller

Core Responsibilities

Primary Functions

Lead month-end and quarter-end closing activities for assigned entities or business units, ensuring accurate P&L, balance sheet and cash flow reporting, timely journal entries, reconciliations and close checklists in line with group accounting policies.
Prepare, review and present detailed monthly management reports and variance analyses that explain actuals versus budget and prior period, highlighting root causes, commercial impacts and recommended corrective actions for senior management.
Own the annual budgeting and periodic forecasting cycles, developing bottom-up and top-down models, consolidating inputs from functional stakeholders, maintaining rolling forecasts and scenario plans to support strategic decision-making.
Build and maintain financial models for revenue, margin and cash flow analysis, incorporating operational drivers, seasonality, and sensitivity analysis to quantify upside/downside and support pricing or investment decisions.
Act as the primary business partner to commercial, supply chain and operations leaders, translating operational KPIs into financial outcomes, influencing plans to improve profitability and aligning financial objectives with business strategy.
Manage month-end accruals, prepayments and intercompany reconciliations, ensuring timely resolution of balance sheet items and compliance with statutory, tax and group reporting requirements.
Develop, monitor and improve key performance indicators (KPIs) and dashboards (e.g., GP%, OPEX to revenue, working capital metrics) using Excel, Power BI or Tableau to provide actionable insight across the business.
Lead variance and root cause investigations for unexpected deviations, coordinating with process owners to implement corrective actions and documenting lessons learned to prevent recurrence.
Drive continuous improvement initiatives in finance processes (close-to-report, budgeting, forecast accuracy), identifying automation opportunities, standardizing policies and reducing manual effort and cycle time.
Support monthly and quarterly forecast updates for cash flow and working capital, forecasting cash requirements, and partnering with treasury on liquidity planning and funding strategies.
Oversee cost control and cost allocation processes, partnering with procurement and operations to analyze cost drivers, implement cost saving programs and monitor cost reduction delivery.
Prepare comprehensive financial analysis and business cases for capital expenditure (CAPEX), new product launches, pricing changes and strategic investments, including NPV, IRR, payback and sensitivity analysis.
Ensure compliance with internal control requirements and SOX (or equivalent) control frameworks by documenting processes, operating controls, testing control effectiveness and remediating control gaps.
Coordinate internal and external audit requests, preparing schedules, reconciliations and explanations to auditors and implementing audit findings in a timely manner.
Consolidate financial results across multiple entities or regions, ensuring consistent accounting treatment and preparation of management and statutory consolidation packs.
Advise on accounting treatment of complex transactions and non-routine items, liaise with group accounting, tax and external advisors to ensure accurate and compliant reporting under IFRS/GAAP.
Manage and mentor junior finance staff and analysts, assigning work, providing coaching, supporting development plans and maintaining a high-performing finance team.
Partner with HR and business leaders on workforce cost analysis, headcount planning and workforce productivity metrics to align resource plans with financial targets.
Drive pricing and margin improvement initiatives by analyzing product-line profitability, customer-level margins and discounting practices and recommending optimized pricing strategies.
Support M&A activities and post-merger integration from a controlling perspective: perform target financial due diligence, build integration run-rate models, and harmonize reporting and controls post-close.
Maintain and optimize ERP and financial reporting systems (e.g., SAP, Oracle, Netsuite), working with IT to enhance data integrity, reporting templates and automated data feeds.
Prepare ad-hoc financial analyses for the Executive Committee and Board, translating complex financial data into clear, concise narratives and recommendations to support strategic decisions.

Secondary Functions

Lead or participate in cross-functional projects such as ERP implementations, system upgrades or process redesigns to strengthen finance controls and reporting accuracy.
Provide training and guidance to non-finance stakeholders on financial basics, reporting packs and interpretation of commercial metrics to uplift business financial literacy.
Support corporate tax and compliance activities by providing schedules, reconciliations and required documentation for tax filings and regulatory submissions.
Contribute to the design and rollout of KPIs and scorecards for business units, ensuring measures are business-relevant, measurable and tied to incentives where appropriate.
Handle ad-hoc management requests, special projects and competitive benchmarking analyses to inform strategic planning and market positioning.
Facilitate month-end close retrospectives and post-mortems to capture improvement opportunities and lead the implementation of agreed changes.
Support sustainability and ESG reporting needs from a financial perspective, including carbon cost modelling, sustainability investments and related KPI tracking.
Maintain relationships with external stakeholders such as auditors, bankers and consultants to ensure access to specialist advice and benchmarking data when required.

Required Skills & Competencies

Hard Skills (Technical)

Financial planning & analysis (FP&A): budgeting, rolling forecasts, scenario & sensitivity modelling.
Financial reporting and consolidation across multiple entities; strong working knowledge of IFRS and/or US GAAP.
Accounting & control fundamentals: month-end close, balance sheet reconciliations, accruals, prepayments and intercompany accounting.
Advanced Excel modelling skills (pivot tables, complex formulas, VBA or macros where relevant) and experience building scalable models.
Experience with ERP and financial systems such as SAP, Oracle, NetSuite, Microsoft Dynamics or similar for GL, reporting and master-data management.
Data visualization and dashboarding with Power BI, Tableau, Qlik or equivalent to deliver management reporting and KPI trackers.
Familiarity with financial consolidation and planning tools such as Hyperion, Anaplan, OneStream or SAP BPC.
Cost accounting, product costing and gross margin analysis to support pricing and profitability initiatives.
Strong knowledge of working capital management, cash flow forecasting and treasury collaboration.
Financial modelling for business cases: NPV, IRR, DCF, sensitivity and scenario analysis.
Internal controls and compliance (SOX or local equivalents): control design, testing and remediation.
Basic SQL or data query skills to extract and validate datasets from transactional systems (advantageous).
Experience preparing materials for board packs, investor reports or steering committees.

Soft Skills

Excellent business partnering and stakeholder management skills with the ability to influence senior leaders and cross-functional teams.
Strong commercial acumen, able to translate operational drivers into financial outcomes and actionable recommendations.
Exceptional attention to detail and accuracy when preparing financial reports and reconciliations.
Clear, concise communication and presentation skills—able to tell a data-driven story and produce executive-ready slide decks.
Problem-solving mindset with ability to prioritize, structure analyses and deliver under tight deadlines.
Leadership and people development: experience coaching, delegating and building capabilities in junior staff.
High level of integrity and ownership, comfortable handling confidential financial information.
Adaptability and resilience: thrives in changing environments and during business transformation or M&A activity.
Time management and organizational skills to manage multiple reporting cycles, projects and ad-hoc requests.
Collaborative mindset with a continuous improvement orientation and openness to automation and process optimization.

Education & Experience

Educational Background

Minimum Education:

Bachelor's degree in Finance, Accounting, Economics or Business Administration.

Preferred Education:

Master's degree (MSc, MBA) or professional accounting qualification (CPA, ACCA, ACA, CMA).

Relevant Fields of Study:

Finance
Accounting
Economics
Business Administration
Management

Experience Requirements

Typical Experience Range: 5–10 years of progressive finance experience with at least 3+ years in FP&A, controlling, management reporting or business partnering roles.

Preferred: 7+ years experience in business controlling or commercial finance within medium-to-large corporate environments, multinational exposure, experience with ERP consolidation tools and prior people management experience.