Job Placement · Accounting & CPA · Controller
A controller directs the preparation of the financial reports and oversees the accounting, audit and budget functions. Raising capital, investment decisions and merger planning sit with the CFO and treasury side. Knowing which of those you are hiring is the search. BEG places permanent controllers on Tier IV milestone billing at $19,080 to $22,896.
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TL;DR
Controller searches go wrong when the company is actually shopping for a CFO, or the reverse. The BLS definitions are unusually clean on this: controllers direct the preparation of financial reports and oversee the accounting, audit and budget departments, while raising capital and planning mergers sits with treasurers and finance officers. A controller is accountable for whether the numbers are right; a CFO is accountable for what the business decides because of them. Benchmark against the financial manager code, which BLS puts at a $166,570 median, not the accountant code at $83,680. BEG runs the search on Tier IV milestone billing at $19,080 to $22,896, fixed before sourcing.
Where The Line Actually Falls
Backward-looking accountability against forward-looking accountability. The controller is answerable for the accuracy of what happened. The CFO is answerable for the capital decisions taken next.
Deciding Which Seat You Are Filling
Work through what is actually being asked of the finance function right now, because the answer changes the title, the pool, the fee tier and the reporting line.
| What the business needs | The seat that owns it | What goes wrong if you hire the other one |
|---|---|---|
| The close is late and the audit is painful | Controller. This is ledger ownership, policy, review capacity and an accounting team that works. Where the company files with the SEC the licence stops being optional, because BLS states any accountant filing an SEC report must be a licensed CPA. | A CFO hired for this spends their first year doing a controller job, resents it, and leaves as soon as the close is stable. |
| A lender or an investor needs convincing | CFO. BLS puts capital raising and investment planning on the treasury and finance officer side of the function, not the controller side. | A controller hired for this produces accurate packs for conversations they were never equipped to lead, and the board concludes finance is weak when it is simply miscast. |
| The board wants a three-year plan | CFO, with an FP&A capability underneath. Forecasting a plan and forecasting a cash position are different exercises. | A controller builds the model from the ledger up and cannot defend the assumptions, because the assumptions are commercial rather than accounting judgements. |
| Both, and the budget covers one | Controller first in most cases, because an unreliable record makes every forward-looking conversation worse. | Hiring the CFO first into a broken close produces an expensive executive doing reconciliation triage, which is the most costly possible way to fix a ledger. |
BEG will tell you when we think the seat you described is not the seat you need, including when that means a smaller search than the one you asked for. The seat above this one is CFO, the seat below is accounting manager, and full scope sits on the accounting and CPA placement service page.
Milestone Billing Against A Percentage Of Salary
At controller level the contingency model gets expensive quickly, because the fee is a share of a six-figure salary. Benchmarked to the $166,570 BLS median for financial managers, 20% is $33,314 and 25% is $41,643. BEG prices a controller search as a Tier IV engagement at $19,080 to $22,896, agreed before sourcing and unchanged by the final offer. That is roughly $14,000 to $22,000 less at median, and the recruiter no longer has a financial interest in persuading you to stretch.
What An Open Controller Seat Costs
A company without a controller does not stop closing the books, it stops trusting them. The accounting manager signs off work nobody senior reviewed, technical judgements get deferred rather than decided, and the audit arrives to find a year of decisions made by whoever was available. The expensive consequences are not in the vacancy months, they are in the audit adjustments, the restated management accounts and the lender conversation that has to be reopened. Those costs land six to twelve months after the seat emptied, which is why they are almost never attributed to it.
If You Were Searching For An Accounting Staffing Agency
Three genuinely different products. Name who employs the controller in each and the choice usually makes itself.
| Model | Who employs the controller | How you pay | Right when |
|---|---|---|---|
| Interim or fractional controller firm | The provider | Day rate or monthly retainer for as long as the engagement runs | A controller resigned without notice, an audit is imminent, and the permanent decision deserves more thought than the calendar allows. |
| Contingency recruiter | You | Percentage of first-year salary on placement, $33,314 to $41,643 at the financial manager median | You want nothing payable until a start date and accept a fee that grows with every improvement to the offer. |
| BEG permanent placement | You | Tier IV milestone fee, $19,080 to $22,896, fixed before sourcing | The accounting function needs an owner for the next several years and you want the fee settled before the first approach. |
BEG does not employ controllers and does not bill by the day, so interim cover is not on our menu and we will name it when it is the better answer. Running an interim while a permanent search is live is sensible. Letting the interim arrangement run for eighteen months because it is easier than deciding is how a company ends up with no institutional accounting memory at all. Related: VP finance recruiting.
FAQ
Direction of travel, not seniority. BLS describes controllers as directing the preparation of financial reports that summarise and forecast the organisation’s position and overseeing the accounting, audit and budget departments. The same source puts capital raising, investments and merger and acquisition planning with treasurers and finance officers. The controller owns the record. The CFO owns what the record is used to argue for.
Ask who is currently being asked the hard questions. If the questions are about whether the numbers are right and on time, that is a controller. If they are about whether to raise debt, what the next three years look like to an investor, and what the board should approve, that is a CFO. Hiring a controller to answer the second set produces a good accountant who feels set up to fail.
Often, and BLS explicitly names that path, noting experienced financial managers may advance to chief financial officer. What it does not guarantee is that a particular controller wants to. The test is whether they enjoy the parts of the job that face outwards, lenders, auditors, the board, or whether those are the parts they tolerate to get back to the close.
The general ledger, the close, the audit relationship, the policy decisions that determine how transactions are recorded, and the accounting team that produces all of it. In most companies they also own the statutory and regulatory filings, which BLS notes as controllers being in charge of preparing reports required by government agencies that regulate businesses.
More often than at any level below, and still not always. The licence becomes effectively mandatory where the company files with the Securities and Exchange Commission, because BLS states any accountant filing an SEC report must be a licensed CPA. In a private company with an external audit and no filings, a controller with deep audit and technical accounting experience is frequently the stronger hire.
Benchmark against the financial manager code rather than the accountant code. BLS puts financial managers, the group that contains controllers and treasurers, at a $166,570 median with the lowest 10% under $94,310, against a $83,680 median for accountants and auditors. A controller sits inside the first band, usually below its midpoint outside large companies.
A Tier IV search at $19,080 to $22,896, billed against defined milestones rather than a percentage of the salary. A 20% to 25% contingency fee benchmarked to the $166,570 BLS median for financial managers would be $33,314 to $41,643, so the contingency model is roughly $14,000 to $22,000 more expensive on the same permanent hire.
No. Interim controller providers employ the controller and bill you a day rate while they hold the function together, and that is the right answer to a sudden resignation. BEG places a permanent controller your company employs directly. If today needs an interim rather than a search, we will say so instead of starting one.
An average of 23 to 35 days from discovery call to signed offer, based on isolved placement data, with an 86% fill rate on active searches. Start dates typically run longer than the search, because controllers negotiate to deliver a year-end or an audit before leaving and most companies would rather they did.
Having been the person the auditors escalate to. Not the size of the last company, not the software, and not the number of direct reports. A controller who has defended a judgement to an audit partner, changed a policy and then lived with the consequence for four quarters is a different candidate from one who has run a tidy close inside somebody else’s framework.
It varies enough that the number has to be in the advert. What candidates are really asking is whether there is an accounting manager between them and the preparers. If there is not, the controller is doing review work, which changes both the profile you should hire and the salary that profile expects.
A 45-day replacement guarantee and 50% off a repeat search for the same seat. Stated honestly, a controller failure rarely shows inside 45 days. It shows at the first audit or the first board pack, so the useful safeguard is a defined 90-day scope agreed before the start date rather than reliance on a replacement clause.
Sizing the finance leadership team? See CFO, director of accounting and accounting manager, or all accounting and CPA placement.
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