It usually happens on a Friday. Your Financial Controller asks for ten minutes, closes the door, and hands over a letter. They have been offered something they could not turn down, they are sorry, and they are giving the month’s notice their contract requires.
For the owner or MD of a small or mid-sized business, this is one of the more quietly dangerous moments in the calendar, because in most SMEs the FC is not one member of the finance team. Functionally, they are the finance team, and everything from payroll to the bank covenant reporting runs through their head.
Handled well, the following week determines whether the departure becomes a wobble or a crisis. Here is how to spend it.
Day one: secure the knowledge, not the notice period
The instinct is to start recruiting immediately. Resist it for twenty-four hours and deal with the bigger risk first: undocumented knowledge. Sit down with the departing FC while goodwill is at its highest and agree what will be written down before they leave: the month-end close timetable and checklist, who owns each reconciliation, the reporting calendar, banking and audit contacts, payroll processes, system logins held solely by them, and, most valuably, a candid note of the judgement areas in the numbers. An FC who resigned on good terms will almost always do this willingly. One who is counting down the days in an atmosphere of blame will not, which is worth remembering before the exit conversation turns frosty.
Days two and three: map the calendar against the notice period
Take the notice period and lay it against the finance calendar. Does it cover the next month-end? The VAT return? The audit fieldwork, the year-end, the payroll run? The gaps between the leaving date and the next immovable deadline define how much time you genuinely have, and it is nearly always less than the notice period suggests, because the final fortnight of anyone’s notice is rarely their most productive. Most SMEs discover they have a four-to-six-week window to have a capable replacement in the chair, which is shorter than the average time-to-hire for a permanent senior finance role by some distance.
Day four: separate the permanent decision from the continuity decision
This is the step most businesses miss. A resignation creates two problems, not one: who runs the finance function next quarter, and who runs it for the next five years. Collapsing them into a single rushed permanent hire is how businesses end up re-recruiting the role twelve months later. The permanent search should be done properly, which takes time you do not have; continuity is a different, faster problem with a well-established answer.
An interim financial controller can typically be in place within days rather than months. Experienced interims are used to landing in unfamiliar businesses mid-cycle, taking a documented handover from the outgoing FC, and holding the function steady while the permanent search runs at a sensible pace. They also bring a quietly useful side benefit: an experienced outside pair of eyes on the function, which often surfaces improvements a permanent successor will thank you for.
Day five: brief the team and the stakeholders
Tell the finance team before the rumour mill does, and be straightforward with external stakeholders who deal with the FC directly: the bank, the auditors, key suppliers on payment plans. A one-line note saying the role is covered and introducing the interim arrangement protects more goodwill than silence ever does. Lenders in particular respond far better to a business that visibly has a plan than to one that goes quiet at the finance desk.
The week after: run the real search properly
With continuity secured, the permanent hire can be what it should be: considered, well-specified, and benchmarked against what the role has become rather than what it was when the departing FC was hired. Businesses grow; the FC role grows with them, and a resignation is often the first moment anyone re-examines the job description in years. Take the opportunity.
A Financial Controller resigning is never welcome news. But the businesses that come through it cleanly are not the lucky ones; they are the ones that spent the first week securing knowledge, buying continuity, and refusing to let urgency make the long-term decision. That is a week’s work. It is worth doing well.
Adrian Lawrence FCA, founder of Accountancy Capital.
