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For many businesses, growth rarely waits for governance to catch up. New markets open, new entities are formed, and transaction volumes spike, often before finance teams have time to standardize processes or strengthen controls. For today’s controllers, that imbalance is no longer a background concern. It’s the defining challenge of the role.
The modern controller is stepping into organizations where complexity is the norm: multi-subsidiary structures, cross-border payments, evolving tax regulations, and heightened audit expectations. In this environment, financial oversight becomes more than a reporting function. It becomes an anchor that ensures growth is not only fast but sustainable.
When both scale and trust are core value propositions, the controller’s role needs to expand. Standardizing accounting policies, implementing automated internal controls, and building audit-ready processes are no longer “nice to have.” They are foundational to maintaining credibility with customers, partners, and regulators alike.
Today, growth can no longer come at the expense of governance. Instead, the finance function must become a source of stability. One that provides the structural integrity required to support sustainable growth in an increasingly complex world.
Redefining the Controller Role
Accuracy and a timely close have long defined the controller’s role, but today they are only the starting point.
For growing businesses, the controller’s mandate has expanded from recording history to shaping how financial operations function day-to-day. That shift is driven by necessity. As companies scale across entities, fragmented processes naturally emerge (differing approval rules, inconsistent invoice handling, disconnected systems that feed the general ledger). Over time, these gaps erode trust in the numbers you’re reporting, which increases audit and compliance risk.
The modern controller can respond to these challenges by building stronger frameworks, not just fixing errors. Standardized accounting policies, consistent controls, and automated workflows create a shared operating language across the business. Instead of reacting to issues at month-end, controllers can design systems that surface them in real-time.
This evolution also changes how finance teams spend their day. When manual data entry and reconciliations are replaced with integrated, automated processes, teams can focus on analysis and building partnerships within the business. The controller role becomes less of a gatekeeper and more of a financial anchor—designing environments where reliable data supports better decisions at every level.
Why Accounts Payable Sits at the Center
Nowhere is this shift more tangible than in accounts payable. AP is often treated as a transactional function, but for controllers, it is the heartbeat of operational finance. AP touches nearly every critical financial process, including:
- Cash Flow and Liquidity
- Vendor Trust and Payment Accuracy
- Tax and Regulatory Compliance
- Audit Readiness and Internal Controls
When AP processes are fragmented or manual, those risks compound quickly. As invoice volumes grow and payment models become more complex, controllers can no longer rely on informal checks or post-close reviews to maintain control.
This reality creates another challenge for controllers: how can AP move from a processing function into a scalable operating model? In my day-to-day, I’ve found that the answer lies in designing an environment where AP teams are no longer buried in manual work. Shifting our focus to higher-value activities, like spend visibility and proactive cash planning, empowers my team to operate at a new level. For us, that transformation is not just operationally beneficial—it’s a strategic imperative for the organization.
Your 90-Day Controller Roadmap: From Assessment to Impact
The first 90 days of building or retooling your role as a controller can set the trajectory for everything that follows. This period is not about making cosmetic changes. It’s about establishing credibility, identifying risk, and laying a foundation for sustainable growth.
Phase 1: Find the Fault Lines (Days 1–30)
Goal: Establish your function as a financial anchor by identifying where growth has outpaced governance.
The first month is about listening, observing, and documenting the reality of your processes. Not just how your workflows are supposed to work, but how they actually work. Key priorities include:
- Multi-Entity Mapping
- Document all legal entities, payment flows, and approval structures.
- Identify manual workarounds that create fragmented or inconsistent data.
- Accounting Policy Alignment
- Draft or refine a unified set of accounting policies.
- Ensure these policies are practical, enforceable, and scalable across the organization.
- Governance and Control Review
- Assess current internal controls with an automation lens.
- Identify manual bottlenecks that increase audit risk and slow your month-end close.
Phase 1 paints a clear picture of your governance gaps and identifies process issues that are grounded in reality, not assumptions.
Phase 2: Replace Patches with a Platform (Days 31–60)
Goal: Build a unified, automated finance operating model that connects processes, controls, and data.
With governance gaps identified, this second phase focuses on structural change. This is where controllers move away from disconnected tools and toward an integrated financial ecosystem. Key actions include:
- Process Standardization
- Eliminate siloed point solutions in favor of an end-to-end AP workflow.
- Implement a seamless integration with your ERP to enforce data accuracy.
- Embedded Compliance
- Ensure approval rules, tax validation, and segregation of duties are automatically built into your workflows.
- Embed compliance directly into your systems rather than depending on manual reviews.
- Operational Metrics Reset
- Shift your KPIs away from volume-based metrics.
- Report on new data showing increased team efficiency, improved data accuracy, and greater spend visibility.
Phase 2 marks a turning point where the finance function stops compensating for broken, manual processes and starts implementing automated stability.
Phase 3: Turn Efficiency into an Advantage (Days 61–90)
Goal: With manual bottlenecks removed, unlock your finance team’s capacity for strategic, value-added work.
By the final phase, your focus should shift from building structure to capturing value. With an automated platform in place, you can begin reallocating your team’s time, talent, and attention to initiatives that directly impact the bottom line. Key outcomes include:
- Unified AP Launch
- Roll out a single vendor payments operating model.
- Enable cross-entity collaboration on one shared platform.
- Strategic Resource Reallocation
- Move team capacity away from data entry reviews.
- Refocus on analyzing data and providing insights into spend analysis, cash flow forecasting, and working capital optimization.
- Scalability Stress Test
- Evaluate real-time results against your planned or budgeted figures to better identify, quantify, and explain how the business is actually operating.
- Confirm that your financial framework can support growth, including additional entities, increasing invoice volumes, and regulatory shifts.
At Phase 3, your finance function is no longer catching up to the business. It’s leading it.
The Controller as a Constant
For many organizations, growth will always move faster than governance. New markets will open, transaction volumes will rise, and operational complexity will continue to increase. That reality is a natural occurrence of scaling. What matters is whether your company has a financial anchor strong enough to hold as complexity increases.
This is where the modern corporate controller becomes indispensable. No longer defined by historical reporting alone, the controller role can provide the structure, discipline, and visibility that allows business growth to remain sustainable.
Your first 90 days are the inflection point. They are the window where governance gaps are identified, fragmented processes are replaced with automated systems, and finance shifts from reacting to leading. When approached with intention, this period establishes more than operational improvements—it sets a financial foundation for how the business will scale going forward.
