25 Financial Controller Interview Questions
Assess month-end close discipline, internal controls, consolidation, reporting and the ability to advise business leaders, not just to produce accurate numbers.
Financial Controller Interview Questions
25 total- 1
Walk me through your month-end close, day by day. Where does it usually slip and why?
- 2
What have you done to shorten a close without lowering the quality of the numbers?
- 3
How do you design internal controls that protect the company without slowing the business down?
- 4
How do you reconcile balance sheet accounts, and what do you do with items that stay open for months?
- 5
How have you produced consolidated accounts when entities use different systems or charts of accounts?
- 6
Tell me about a significant error you found after the books were closed. What did you do and who did you tell?
- 7
How would you treat revenue on a multi-year contract with milestones and a variable component?
- 8
How do you work with external auditors, and what makes an audit go smoothly?
- 9
How do you build the annual budget and the rolling forecast together with business leaders?
- 10
How do you explain a cost variance to a manager who does not read financial statements?
- 11
Tell me about a time you disagreed with a business leader over an accounting treatment. How did it end?
- 12
Which indicators do you report every month, and which one do you think management reads wrongly?
- 13
How do you forecast cash and manage working capital when payments are unpredictable?
- 14
Describe an ERP or finance system migration you took part in. What would you do differently?
- 15
The tax filing, an audit request and the close all land in the same week. How do you prioritise?
- 16
How do you detect the risk of fraud or of management overriding controls?
- 17
How do you organise your accounting team, and how have you developed a junior accountant into a senior one?
- 18
How do you keep up with changes in accounting standards and decide when they affect your numbers?
- 19
Tell me about a time you had to deliver unwelcome news to the CEO or the CFO.
- 20
How do you decide which finance processes to automate first?
- 21
How would you handle the financial integration of an acquired company in the first six months?
- 22
How do you manage relations with banks and monitor compliance with loan covenants?
- 23
Describe a cost-reduction exercise you led. How did you decide where to cut and where not to?
- 24
How do you maintain segregation of duties in a small finance team?
- 25
What would you want to have achieved in this role after ninety days?
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