The finance director I never had to hire.
A group of companies, with the personal cash flow held alongside: cash flow, CapEx, tax planning, HMRC, the books. The kind of group finance director an owner-managed business could never justify hiring. So it's all in order, and I'm not carrying it in my head.
Each company has its own books, its own deadlines, its own accountant. What they owe each other, and what the whole thing actually means, lives in nobody's head.
A group finance director holds that picture. At owner-managed scale, you can't justify hiring one, so it stays in the founder's head, at night.
So I recruited a group finance director.
It sees every company and the personal side at once, the vantage no single-company accountant has. It advises; I decide; the accountant blesses it in writing. And it works to one rule: never fill a gap with a plausible number. Opened at source, or flagged as missing.
One desk, the whole estate.
A running position for the business and the personal side, the tight months seen coming, not discovered.
Salary, dividends, drawings and timing, one plan across the group.
Every filing, tax date and statutory window, nothing relying on memory.
Freehold-vs-lease, supplier switches, the numbers built before the decision.
Alongside the bookkeeping in Xero, anchored to the bank, not to stale ledgers.
A queue of forensic questions worked while I sleep, sourced notes by morning.
It shows me where I'll be, 18 months out.
Business and personal, one running balance. It sees the tight quarters coming months ahead, so you can act early instead of reacting late.
Running closing cash by quarter, the business and the personal side by side, a live model anchored to the bank, not to the ledger. The shape is real; the figures are mine, so they're blacked out.
It plans tax across the whole group, as one system.
Not one company at a time, the whole group together. Each option modelled, sized against the others, then taken to the accountant to sign off.
It audits the books while I sleep.
A queue of forensic questions, worked one bounded item at a time through the night. Each answer traced to a source document. By morning, the file was done.
It keeps the paperwork straight.
Loans, dividends, board minutes, the agreements a group is meant to have in writing. It drafts them, sources the terms, and tracks what still needs a signature.
An example, an inter-company loan agreement, drafted for signature with the terms sourced and the figures held back.
It caught a wrong number in its own ledger.
Mid-audit, it doubted one of its own figures.
It went back to the signed accounts, re-read the page at source, corrected the entry and logged the fix. The rule holds even when the number is its own.
The whole-group picture, held, not remembered.
Trust is the whole asset.
A finance desk is only worth anything if you can believe it. That's why the first rule is written down: no plausible numbers, ever, opened at source, or flagged as a gap. That's what turns a pile of spreadsheets into peace of mind.