13 Financial Controller Challenges and How to Address Them

A company’s books have always contained a treasure trove of data, even if it was buried. These financial figures, once scrawled in plus and minus columns on dusty ledgers and in spreadsheets, are now stored in sophisticated applications, making it possible to harvest a huge amount of strategic value from them.

Technological advancements in both managing and analyzing data have evolved the role of financial controllers from lead accountant to something akin to data analyst, a function that used to be entirely out of their wheelhouse. Achieving this shift requires proficiency in using cutting-edge technologies, such as AI and advanced analytics, to forecast financial conditions, evaluate complex spending patterns, connect and automate financial processes, and provide insights and analysis to decision-makers across the organization.

What Does a Financial Controller Do?

A financial controller oversees an organization’s day-to-day accounting operations. Traditionally, the job involved granular tracking of receivables and expenditures, reporting financial results internally to corporate decision-makers, and delivering official financial statements to regulators and investors. Controllers oversee the monthly, quarterly, and annual financial close processes, ensuring that the company produces financial statements in accordance with generally accepted accounting principles, or GAAP for short.

But if you ask most controllers these days what they do, you’ll hear a much more complicated job description. That’s because, as the custodians of critical business data, financial controllers are increasingly asked to build and supervise teams that can apply sophisticated data science tools and methods to prepare financial forecasts and uncover strategic insights. These professionals, typically CPAs with experience leading teams of accountants, are looking to their technology vendors and consultants to help them and their teams transform from bookkeepers to strategic planners.

Key Takeaways

• Financial controllers’ chief responsibility is to make sure their organizations’ accounting ledgers are always accurate and up-to-date and the information in those critical records is reported in a timely fashion to key decision-makers in the organization, as well as to investors and regulators when required.
• Financial records have always been a useful source of data for improving business models, forecasting market conditions and results, and uncovering operational insights. AI and advanced analytics have bolstered these attributes—and the value of that data.
• Financial controllers need to become more forward-looking and technologically adept as they increasingly are expected to glean business insights from the data under their purview. That leaves them with much greater responsibility for managing, securing, and sharing their company’s most vital data.

Top 13 Challenges for Financial Controllers

Challenge 1: Finding the Right Talent

Controllers succeed when they’re surrounded by competent and experienced teams of finance and accounting professionals. But identifying what the right skills and experiences look like and finding employees who meet that description can be difficult at a time when the financial function calls for traditional accounting and bookkeeping skills as well as adeptness in using advanced IT tools and data-driven methodologies.

Answer: Finding the right talent often requires identifying current employees able to grow into higher-level roles, then creating a training and development plan and charting a career path for them. Financial controllers should also work closely with HR to describe the skill set and experience that best fits their organization’s needs and involve themselves as much as possible in the recruiting, hiring, onboarding, and initial training processes. Technology can help. The best cloud-based human capital management applications can help engage job candidates at every step of the process. These applications also give controllers a real-time view of current and future staffing needs and they enable job candidates to apply for open positions on their mobile devices, which accelerates the process of vetting applicants, scheduling interviews, and making offers.

Challenge 2: Summarizing Raw Data into Actionable Insights

Accounting is an inherently data-driven field. In recent years, however, advances in data science have changed the role of financial controllers from custodians of financial data to enablers of strategic planning based on that data. Controllers must not only ensure that their teams keep ledgers accurate and up-to-date; increasingly they’re also expected to take the raw data in those ledgers, evaluate it with cutting-edge AI and analytics tools to surface actionable insights, and share those insights with decision-makers who shape business strategy.

Answer: To excel in this task, financial controllers should surround themselves with data experts and work with IT to procure digital tools that deliver AI-powered forecasting and big data analytics.

Challenge 3: Staying Compliant

New financial laws and regulations are introduced every year, some of them unique to specific industries, especially highly regulated ones, such as healthcare, banking, and insurance, or unique to specific states and countries. Staying up-to-date and complying with this ever-evolving patchwork of rules can be complicated and much of that responsibility falls on the financial controller. Failure to do so can result in sanctions and penalties—and damage a company’s reputation.

Answer: Controllers can make it easier to address compliance by adopting centralized financial systems that automatically implement the latest accounting and reporting requirements. Controllers should also take the lead in providing their organizations’ compliance officers with consolidated business information, make sure their teams undergo regular compliance training, and conduct periodic audits.

Challenge 4: Forecasting Priorities

A controller isn’t responsible only for day-to-day financial operations. Buried within the figures are insights about where the company can make investments to drive future growth and mitigate risks.

Answer: Recent technological advances, especially AI, provide predictive capabilities that augment intuition, experience, and past results in identifying opportunities and flagging potential pitfalls. Financial controllers should take advantage of these advanced tools to forecast priorities and help business leaders across the organization set long-term goals and strategies to achieve them.

Challenge 5: Connecting with Other Departments

Functional silos, in which different departments within a company or organization operate independently, hinder operational efficiency. That’s especially true in the financial controller’s office, which needs to provide budgetary feedback and timely updates that help executives in other departments make important decisions on priorities, investments, and operating strategies.

Answer: The controller should take the lead in ensuring that the finance team works closely with every department across the organization so that all business leaders understand budgetary priorities and procurement policies and have a good sense of the company’s overall financial health. It’s also important for controllers to work with the company’s IT leaders to procure and deploy tech tools that support collaboration across divisions.

Challenge 6: Budgetary Constraints

Financial controllers understand their organizations’ budgets—and the constraints upon them—as well as anyone. Most controllers have been tasked with finding ways to reduce costs and improve efficiency.

Answer: Controllers should clearly communicate budgetary constraints to executives across the organization, helping them understand which spending initiatives to prioritize and how (and where) to identify cost-saving opportunities. They should also look to adopt financial management applications that drive efficiency and help cut spending by tracking key indicators that measure budget performance and the financial health of the business.

Challenge 7: Improving Communication

Communication is a soft skill most controllers think they need to improve, according to various surveys. It’s a key part of their job because controllers are responsible for making sure leaders across the organization have a clear and comprehensive understanding of budgetary constraints, spending priorities, and the overall financial health of the business.

Answer: Most controllers have access to the latest communication and collaboration applications—but no digital tool can make up for human shortcomings. Controllers should invest in their own training and ask their teams to suggest ways they can improve how they communicate their goals and expectations.

Challenge 8: Inaccurate Spending Figures

Tracking spending is one of the most important data management undertakings for most organizations, and the financial controller is responsible for ensuring that all expenditures are precisely accounted for in the books. That spending includes procurement of supplies and services, outsourcing costs, capital expenses, payroll, IT investments, and even outlays for acquisitions. There’s no room for mistakes—inaccurate figures can undermine important initiatives already in the works and lead to problems with investors and regulators. At the same time, given the complexity of B2B invoicing, there are many places where errors can crop up, especially when different divisions independently procure capital equipment, services, and supplies.

Answer: To help ensure that spending figures are exact, controllers should direct their teams to follow best practices for spending analysis, especially with gathering, categorizing, and cleansing financial data. They should also require maintaining records with invoice-level details and conduct monthly account reconciliation so that the general ledger is consistent with other financial documents. A centralized ERP system consolidates all financial data to inform rigorous spending analyses, helping ensure that spending figures are accurate across all sources.

Challenge 9: Incomplete Reporting

Financial controllers are responsible not only for ensuring that the books are accurate, comprehensive, and up-to-date, but also that the information is faithfully reported to the appropriate internal and external stakeholders. Executives rely on these financial statements to shape strategy while investors and regulators scrutinize them. Manual accounting methods tend to lack consistency and can generate reports that are error-prone and incomplete.

Answer: Centralized financial software with sophisticated reporting features, coupled with sound and automated business processes, can help controllers avoid these costly missteps. Key capabilities include real-time access to financial data, automation of workflows in the reporting process, customized report creation, financial consolidation, and data validation and error correction.

Challenge 10: International Expansion

Ecommerce, remote work, and the ability to ship digital products over the internet have enabled companies of all sizes to address a global market like never before. But these opportunities to grow the business across borders add new challenges for financial controllers.

Answer: Controllers at companies that do business internationally need financial applications that help them address different and emerging regulatory and accounting requirements in different countries as well as handle various currencies, tax rates, languages, and customs restrictions.

Challenge 11: Security Risks

Financial executives surveyed by Accenture cited data and privacy breaches as the biggest threat preventing them from acting as drivers of strategic change within their organizations. The same report also found that only 28% of finance professionals were engaged in managing risk through data security.

Answer: Controllers should work closely with their organizations’ CIO and IT teams to give them visibility and input into cybersecurity operations, such as patching financial databases and applications. They can help ensure end-to-end security by emphasizing to their teams, especially those with access to sensitive financial data, the importance of security protocols such as endpoint encryption, following incident-response procedures, and avoiding unauthorized software, as well as by providing training on creating strong passwords and recognizing social engineering and phishing techniques.

Challenge 12: Remote Work

As of the summer of 2023, more than one-quarter of US employees did their jobs remotely, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Remote work provides both a challenge and an opportunity for financial controllers. When accommodated by capable technology, this shift can increase employee productivity and contentment. But it can also make it harder to unify teams and train inexperienced staff.

Answer: To make remote work a net positive, financial controllers should ensure their teams are connected through centralized, secure cloud-based business and accounting systems and adhere to processes that provide controls over and visibility into the workloads and productivity of employees not supervised in-person. Applications that automate financial processes, such as data entry, invoice matching and reconciliation, and reporting, are an effective way to eliminate manual processes that were inefficient, but workable, in an office environment.

Challenge 13: Data Accessibility

Although it’s not in their traditional wheelhouse, financial controllers are increasingly called on to manage, govern, and provide executives across the organization access to the financial data that informs business decisions. The exponential growth in the volume of financial data created by large organizations in recent years has exacerbated this challenge.

Answer: That’s why it’s essential for the controller to work closely with the CIO and other IT leaders to acquire the tools and expertise needed to help ensure data quality and accessibility, and to standardize financial data systems across departments. Many controllers are looking to create the much-discussed “single source of truth”—a shared repository of financial data that breaks down silos, can be accessed quickly by those who need the data, and centralizes security and governance.

Help Solve Your Controller Challenges with Oracle

Financial controllers are seeking centralized financial systems stocked with analytics tools to help them evolve their roles beyond day-to-day accounting.

Oracle Fusion Cloud Financials, part of the Oracle Fusion Cloud ERP suite of applications, connects critical financial management processes across an enterprise and consolidates data into a single source of financial information, making it more accessible, reliable, and secure. The platform can also automate more than 80% of financial processes, including the settling of intercompany transactions and creation of tax reports. By reducing manual steps, financial statements can be less prone to human error and books can close faster. For controllers whose organizations do business internationally, the Oracle Cloud platform delivers out-of-the-box tools for addressing multinational accounting requirements and the ability to quickly introduce new accounting standards and rules. It can also handle multiple currencies, tax rates, customs restrictions, and languages.

The Oracle Accounting Hub makes it easy to unify financial data from multiple accounting systems, creating a complete view of financial data to help create better forecasts, shorter reporting cycles, and more data-driven decisions.

Oracle’s ERP suite is fully integrated with Oracle’s cutting-edge AI tools, enabling controllers to take advantage of AI to help improve operational efficiency, automate standard transactions, better predict business outcomes, and forecast and optimize cash flow.

Financial Controller Challenges FAQs

What are the top skills a financial controller needs?
A financial controller first and foremost needs deep accounting skills, usually accompanied by a CPA license. Strong leadership skills are also extremely important, especially for controllers who run large accounting departments. Controllers are also expected to be adept at using data analytics and reporting technologies to improve financial forecasts and help deliver insights into their organizations’ financial health.

What does a controller do in finance?
A financial controller has a complicated set of responsibilities. Beyond managing day-to-day financial operations, including accurately keeping all financial records and reporting financial results, the controller leads a team that analyzes financial data to support strategic planning.

How is a financial controller different from a CFO?
A financial controller is a company’s lead accountant, responsible for maintaining accurate books and records and running the day-to-day activities of the accounting department. As such, the controller is usually a senior manager who reports to the CFO. The CFO is an organization’s top financial executive responsible for driving overall financial strategy. These two types of leaders often work closely together to advance their company’s financial position.