The Finance Director resume,
and the days it takes to close.
A Finance Director is judged on two things that never reach the page: whether the numbers arrive on time, and whether they later turn out to be right. The resume offers stewardship instead. Oversight of reporting, adherence to policy, support to the business. None of it can be checked, and all of it was in the job description.
What a CFO looks for in the first minute
Finance Director is a wider title than it appears. A divisional FD supports an operating P&L and lives alongside the business leaders. A group FD owns consolidation, statutory accounts and the audit relationship. A country FD in a multinational carries local filings, tax and a group reporting pack at the same time, often with a team of six. Those are three different interviews, and a resume that leaves the reader guessing is placed in the smallest of them.
The second read is about pressure. Every finance director has closed a month. The question is whether you have closed one during an audit, a system cutover or a covenant test, and whether anything you signed was later restated. Nothing signals control as economically as naming a difficult period and saying what came out of it.
Which finance director you were. Divisional support to an operating P&L, group owner of consolidation and statutory reporting, or a country FD holding local filings, tax and a group pack at once.
The entity picture: companies, currencies, ledgers, the reporting standard applied, and whether consolidation ran in a tool or in a spreadsheet somebody maintained by hand.
Team shape. How many qualified accountants, whether transactional teams or a shared service centre reported to you, and whether you owned the offshore centre or were a customer of it.
What you could approve alone, what you signed as a statutory director, and what went upward. Authority in finance is specific, and naming the ceiling makes everything below it credible.
Six figures that already sit in your systems
Finance is the only function whose evidence is generated automatically and then archived by law. The difficulty is never availability, it is selection and honesty about the starting point. A single end-state figure tells the reader nothing about what you inherited. Give both ends and the mechanism between them.
Close cycle in working days at both ends, with what you removed to get there, because every finance director claims a faster close and only the mechanism separates a redesign from a deadline that was quietly moved.
Forecast accuracy expressed as a variance band on revenue and on profit, with the reforecast frequency beside it, because accuracy quoted without frequency cannot be interpreted.
Days sales outstanding alongside overdue debt as a share of the ledger and the cash it released, because the ratio on its own can improve for the unwelcome reason that sales fell.
Cost-out delivered against the target you were set, and whether it was still in the run-rate a year later. The second half of that sentence is the half nobody writes.
Audit findings inherited and the date each one closed, plus management letter points and any control deficiency raised. A clean opinion is expected; clearing somebody else's findings is a result.
What a system implementation changed inside the numbers, manual journals per close, reconciliations automated, audit preparation time, rather than the fact that it went live on the planned date.
Stewardship sentences that prove nothing
The three lines below are written by nearly every finance director, and all three describe the role as it was advertised. A CFO reading them learns that you understood your remit, which was never the question.
"Ensured timely and accurate financial reporting in line with group policy." This is the job description. Replace it with the working-day count, the post-close adjustment rate, and how many reporting deadlines were missed across the period.
"Owned the annual budget and quarterly reforecast cycle." Owning a cycle is calendar management. Give the variance the budget ran at, whether the band narrowed year on year, and something you refused to fund.
"Improved processes and efficiency within the finance function." Finance efficiency is measurable to two decimal places. State finance cost as a share of revenue, transactions per full-time equivalent, or headcount held flat while volume grew.
Three lines, rewritten.
The same fact, made checkable. Every figure is illustrative of the shape an evidenced line takes — nothing here is invented on your behalf.
The claim on the left is not wrong. It is simply unreadable as evidence: nothing in it can be checked, compared or priced. The version on the right makes the same statement in a form a search partner can act on.
Responsible for the monthly close and management reporting for the division.
Closed a $310M division in 5 working days, down from 9, with no addition to headcount: 11 recurring manual journals automated, intercompany matched daily instead of at month-end, and a hard cut-off on late accruals agreed with three plant managers. Post-close adjustments fell from 14 a quarter to 2.
Improved the accuracy of forecasting and budgeting across the business.
Moved revenue forecast variance from plus or minus 11% to plus or minus 3%, and EBITDA from 14% to 4%, across four quarters. Rebuilt the forecast from 40 account-level commitments rather than a growth rate applied to last year, and reforecast monthly on a rolling twelve using the same file the board saw.
Delivered cost savings and supported the group efficiency programme.
Delivered $4.6M of cost-out against a $3.8M target over 14 months on a $62M cost base: three supplier categories retendered, a 9% headcount reduction in indirect functions, and two sites merged. $4.1M was still in the run-rate a year later; the shortfall was one contract that reset on renewal.