Any Finance people about - I need to know you Team size

[buzzing]

I work for a company that has undergone significant growth & acquisition in the past couple of years and am struggling with workload, complexity & expectation. Thought it might be helpful to understand finance team size in similar businesses to truly get a handle on whether we need more resource.

We turnover about £10m, £8m in the UK with two o/s subs. They each have their own external accountant and provide me with their accounts each month.

In the UK, there is one full time person who does all credit control and P/L entry (invs raised by separate dept). And then there’s me, dooming everything else (payments, mom told accs, budgets, forecasts, audit, etc etc), at 30 hours p/w, originally FC when it was just the UK, privately owned business. Now under private equity with all the extra work that brings, plus subs, and I am honestly drowning. Both through over work and lack of skill set to support a company with this structure.

Board are ignoring this as we are selling this year and they don’t want to add extra headcount or cost.

Would be interested to know what set up you have, and whether I should just suck it up?

I can't help in terms of finance team size but do all the operational side of my company, from payments, purchasing, book keeping and invoicing.
The problem with turnover alone is £10 million doesn't seem much when the product is £1 million - if the product is 50p then that's a shit load of invoices!
It adds extra work short term but can you keep time slips, record your times over a fortnight (assuming all tasks are done in that time) list the quarterly things like VAT returns and use that as evidence to the board you need support, they could get a Kickstarter person (totally paid for) to do the basic data entry for 6 months to get them to the point of sale.
Go with a solution not just the problem

Good point - we’re a manufacturer of widgets (!) - all b2b and repeat customers. Pretty low value, high volume item though.

And yes, agree about going with a solution - it’s not so much the day to day work, it’s the volume of forecasts, reports, just change this in to that format ... etc etc. And I am so out of my depth because I’ve never worked at this level in a company of this structure before, and I have nobody to mentor me.

No advice, but I’m also out of my depth in a finance role so you’re not alone!

Is your line manager helpful?

We have around 7.5 million turnover over 3 companies within the group and there's the accountant (me), my assistant accountant, one sales ledger/credit control and one purchase ledger.

Organisation of 50. Finance team of 3 PT, overseen by Director of Finance.

That seems like a lot of work to me. I'm not a finance person but do financial management and reporting in a project management role. Aside from it being specifically about finance I have been involved with new projects and recruitment. I ways think it's actually incredibly hard to know what a team or project needs in terms of staffing.

I think you sound short resourced - our team is similar to above - with slightly higher turnover and a lot overseas. We do all the overseas management accounts in house though - as cheaper and quicker for us / control all treasury / do UK tax etc, so it does depend a bit. If you were FC is there theoretically an FD? Or are you on the board?

In name, I’m now FD - prompted when private equity got involved 4 years ago. Not prompted in terms of salary though, as I didn’t have the experience So, we’re now a far bigger, more complicated structure, that I’m not experienced in managing, with nobody further up the financial chain than me. And I’m still paid a fairly modest FC salary. To be fair, it’s not even about the money though, it’s about being overworked and out of my depth.

Really interesting to understand other company set ups, thank you.

Just bumping for the evening crew ...

I'm FM of a company with £9m turnover. Very simple structure though so no consolidation of subsidiaries or anything. I have an assistant accountant who does credit control, bank recs and payroll. One other person who does purchase ledger. There's no finance person above me, although the MD is a CA so has all that background knowledge.

I feel for you as I have been in a similar position in previous job.

Do you have an accounting qualification?

Yeah, I’m CIMA qualified - but I never did any work as an auditor or anything so I do feel very out of my depth when it comes to any technical accounting processes. I generally find my way through, but it feels like I’m constantly riding my luck rather than being in control. Bit of imposter syndrome going on as well I think which doesn’t help things.

Your problem is you are owned by private equity. They always want more and more and more. They do everything they can to keep staff numbers as low as possible.

What’s the revenue growth plan? More acquisitions likely? Once these things ramp up I would imagine they will bring in a new CFO, who will work strategically and you will report to that person. But that might mean even more work for you....