How to build a finance team from scratch as the business scales
Published 1 April 2025 · Updated 14 August 2026
Most finance functions are inherited. Inheriting a finance function is a different challenge: someone joins and the team already exists, with the roles, the reporting lines, the processes, the culture. You work with what is there.
Building from scratch is different. It happens when a business has grown beyond the point where one person can do everything, or when a founder finally decides to professionalise what has been held together by spreadsheets and goodwill. The decisions made at that point tend to stick. Getting them right matters.
Start with what the business actually needs
The first mistake in building a finance function is hiring for what the business has always done rather than what it now needs. A business that has reached the point of needing a finance team is usually also a business with new complexity. Without deliberate design, these are the finance functions that fail at scale: more transactions, more entities, more reporting requirements, more commercial decisions that need financial input.
Before hiring, be clear about the outputs the function needs to produce. Statutory accounts and audit management. Management reporting and board packs. Cashflow forecasting. Commercial analysis. Payroll and AP management. Tax compliance. The list will determine the roles, not the other way around.
The first hire is the most important
If you are building from nothing, the first finance hire carries disproportionate weight. They will shape the function’s approach, its standards, and its culture. They will also recruit or influence subsequent hires.
Hire someone who can build, not just maintain. A person who is comfortable creating processes, documenting them, and training others to follow them. Finance functions that grow well tend to have a senior person at the centre who takes infrastructure seriously, not just outputs. Understanding what the Finance Director role actually is helps you hire the right person for that job.
The sequence depends on the constraint. If cash visibility and controls are weak, a strong Financial Controller may be the first senior hire. If the board needs capital planning, commercial challenge, systems leadership and a finance operating model, the business may already need a CFO or Finance Director.
Do not use turnover alone as the trigger. Complexity matters more. Multiple entities, international operations, external investment, inventory, covenant reporting or a transformation programme can bring the need forward.
A practical role sequence by stage
At the earliest stage, bookkeeping, payroll and statutory work can often be supported externally while one internal finance lead owns cash, reporting and decision support. Outsourced production does not remove the need for internal ownership.
As transaction volume grows, add the roles that remove the operational bottleneck. That may be accounts payable and receivable support, a management accountant or an analyst. Hire against the process load you can evidence, not a copied organisation chart.
The next layer is control and planning. A Financial Controller strengthens close, balance-sheet ownership and audit readiness. FP&A or commercial finance capability improves forecasts, scenarios and business partnering. In some businesses one experienced person covers both for a period. Be explicit about where the compromise sits.
At leadership level, the CFO or Finance Director owns the system as a whole: people, controls, capital, performance, technology and the relationship between finance and the board. That role should not be consumed by work that a properly designed team can own.
The first 90 days for the finance leader
The first month should establish facts. Confirm cash, debt, tax, payroll, material balance-sheet positions, reporting deadlines and the quality of the underlying data. Identify anything that could surprise the board, investors or auditors.
The second month should establish rhythm. Set the close calendar, cash forecast, management-reporting pack, decision forums and clear ownership for each control. Stop producing reports that nobody uses and add the information the leadership team is repeatedly requesting outside the process.
The third month should establish the build plan. Sequence hires, process fixes and systems work against business priorities. Give the board a finance roadmap with outcomes, owners, timing and cost rather than a long list of weaknesses.
This is also the point to decide which work requires permanent capability and which can be supported through a defined external engagement. The answer should follow the operating need, not a preference for one employment model.
Design the roles before you fill them
Write clear role definitions before you hire. Not generic job descriptions, but specific documents that describe what each person will own, what they will produce, what good looks like in that role, and how it connects to the roles above and alongside it.
This discipline forces clarity about the structure before personalities fill it. It also makes hiring and onboarding significantly more effective.
Processes before systems
It is tempting to solve a finance build with a system implementation. Buy the ERP, hire the team, and let the system define the process. This rarely works. Systems need to be configured for defined processes. If the processes are not defined, the system gets configured for nobody’s process in particular and serves everyone poorly.
Define how the function will operate before deciding what technology will support it. The technology decision becomes much simpler once the process is clear.
Build in controls from day one
Finance functions that grow without controls embedded from the start spend years retrofitting them later, usually after an audit finding or a material error. Controls are easier to build into a new function than to add to an established one.
This does not mean bureaucracy. It means clear authorisation limits, defined sign-off procedures, reconciliation disciplines, and documented processes that do not depend on any single person knowing how they work.
The culture question
Finance teams develop cultures that persist. A team that is seen as a gatekeeper becomes adversarial with the rest of the business. A team that is seen as a service function becomes reactive rather than strategic. A team that is seen as a commercial partner gets invited into the decisions that matter.
The culture is shaped early, largely by the most senior person in the function and by the relationships they build with leadership. It is worth being deliberate about it from the start.
I have built finance teams, implemented ERP systems and led reporting and control through international growth and business-model change. If the business needs a permanent CFO or Finance Director to build the function, or a fractional leader for a defined transition, see how I work.
Maebh Collins is a Chartered Accountant (FCA, ICAEW) and finance transformation specialist with Big 4 training and twenty years of operational experience as a founder and senior finance leader.