When does a business need a finance director?

None of these on their own is decisive. Three or four together usually are.

You are profitable on paper but you can't see where the cash went. You are quoting work without knowing the margin on the last job like it. You have had a hiring decision waiting for weeks because you can't tell whether the business can carry the salary. A bank, an investor or a buyer has started asking for numbers you don't have to hand. Or you are the finance function as well as the owner, and it is the part of the week that slips.

A full-time finance director is a senior salary, and for most owner-managed businesses the role isn't a five-day-a-week job — it is a few focused days a month, at the right moments.

The part-time or outsourced route costs a fraction of the salary and brings someone who has seen the same problem in other businesses. What you give up is presence: they aren't in the building when something happens, so the rhythm has to be deliberate — a monthly pack, a monthly conversation, and a standing agenda.

The wrong answer is to hire full-time before the records are reliable. A good appointment then spends their first year fixing bookkeeping rather than improving results.

It applies soonest to businesses with staff, stock or subcontractors, where the numbers move faster than the owner's instinct can track. It applies later — sometimes never — to stable, simple businesses with predictable revenue and an owner who reads their own numbers. We will tell you which you are.