Curious about what a financial controller does and what their
day-to-day job duties are I spent years as a controller and in this video I'm
going to tell you what you can expect.
now a controller position is going to look slightly different depending upon
the size of the company that you're at but for the most part these are the ten
main job functions I performed when I was a controller and you can expect to
be doing those when you're a financial controller so number one is ensuring
proper internal controls now what you'll do is you'll develop and update
accounting policies and procedures that are going to ensure things like the
separation of duties approval of disbursements and any other control
that's going to help prevent fraud in the company now for publicly traded
companies this is going to include all the Sox requirements as well all right
number two is you will lead the accounting team unless you're at a
really small company where you are the entire accounting department you will
have staff supporting you so you'll be responsible for training and developing
your staff as well as making sure that all of your staff is cross trained of
course with staff comes personnel issues now this includes interviewing and
hiring your staff dealing with conflicts that may come up performance issues as
well as employee evaluations now if you're one who doesn't want to supervise
others what you'll want to consider is a position at a smaller company where you
either won't have staff or you'll have very minimal staff now number three is
overseeing all of the accounting functions you'll be responsible for all
of the accounting operations now this includes accounts payable accounts
receivable general ledger functions financial reporting and in the case of
smaller companies the payroll related activity
as well so to break this down you might be the one who reviews invoices and
ensures proper general ledger coding you will ensure that vendors are being paid
and customers are being billed and collections are being made on those
invoices and again if it's a small company you'll be the one that oversees
the payroll functions as well okay number four is overseeing the financial
statement closed process now one of the main responsibilities you're going to
have is to produce monthly financial statements and you're going to produce
them on time so you'll be responsible for handling all of the month end as
well as a year-end closed processes so plan on the first few weeks of your
month certainly the first several days being very busy you may be making
journal entries reconciling accounts reviewing the general ledger for coding
errors or you may be reviewing the work of your staff that's performing these
duties now you'll also be responsible for assembling any monthly financial
packets that's required for bank compliance board meetings or any other
third party user okay number five is performing a financial analysis
typically you'll be doing a fair amount of analysis on the financials and this
can include preparing monthly sales and gross profit analysis and other
statistical reports this includes analyzing monthly operating results
against the budget preparing a month over month or a year over year vary its
reporting and also calculating operating metrics and making recommendations on
ways to measure their performance of the company based on the financial results
okay number six is cash management now in the absence of someone who
exclusively handles the Treasury operations you're the one that will
handle cash management now this may include monitoring cash flow on multiple
bank accounts it can include preparing cash flow
forecasts to distribute to executives the management team so that you can make
recommendations on Treasury decisions and also making cash transfers and
initiating wires when necessary number seven is budget and forecasting you will
be deeply involved in the annual budget process as well as developing forecasts
and projections number eight is you will work very closely with outside
accountants like auditors tax preparers you'll be heavily involved in any annual
financial audits including coordinating with the auditors and really serving as
their main contact point during the audit and you'll also be providing
information to the tax accountants such as financials fixed asset information
and finally once the tax returns are done you'll be given the txt returns a
review and sign off on them okay number nine is you'll be handling the
compliance and tax filings now you may not be the one that prepares the tax
returns but you'll be responsible for the accuracy and the timeliness of all
returns and end the report filings along with income taxes and you may be
responsible for sales tax payroll tax property tax excise tax w2 and 1099
reporting and any other tax filings that may apply and finally number ten you'll
be working closely with company leaders now the controller for a large company
probably reports to the CFO but the controller for a smaller company may be
reporting directly to the owner but either way you'll be working directly
with leaders at the companies now this means that you may review financial
statement and budget variances with departmental managers and discuss
material variances or help to understand trends that you see on the
financials that will impact their department also you'll respond to
questions from senior management regarding financial results forecasts
and performance metrics and you'll be talking a lot to department leaders
throughout that whole budget process that you'll be doing every year so those
are the ten main responsibilities of a controller I hope this helps you better
understand what a financial controller does so comment below and let me know
which one of the ten duties interests you the most if this video was helpful
let me know by liking it and please share with others who have careers in
accounting as well also for more accounting career videos consider
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thanks so much for watching I'll see you next time
you