Finance Controller

North London, South East N1, United Kingdom

Full-time Permanent Entry Level

Posted 09 Sep 2026

Role Overview

Pentatonic is looking for a Finance Controller to take ownership of a function that's ready for its next stage of growth. Our Fractional FD is completing this year's year-end accounts, and we're now looking for someone to build on that foundation — strengthening processes, controls and reporting as the business scales.

You’ll manage one Finance Associate. That's the team. You need to be someone who can do the work yourself, not just direct it, reviewing, building, and fixing in equal measure.

Key Responsibilities

• Own month-end close, management accounts, and Board reporting from day one
• Build and maintain the cash flow forecast, this business needs to know its runway at all times
• Take full ownership of the audit and year-end process going forward, picking up from the fractional FD's handover
• Design and implement controls where none currently exist, reconciliations, approval processes, version control on models
• Manage payroll-adjacent finance touchpoints in coordination with HR (payroll itself sits with HR, but FC owns the numbers that feed it)
• Prepare investor reporting and support fundraising financial narratives
• Challenge spend, hiring business cases, and investment decisions with data, not vibes
• Modernise the finance stack where legacy tools are slowing things down
• Manage and develop the Finance Associate

What You’ll Need

• Qualified accountant (ACA/ACCA/CIMA or equivalent)
• Proven experience in a scale‑up or SME environment where you’ve built a finance function from a messy starting point, not just maintained an existing one
• Comfortable being the most senior finance person in the building day-to-day, with limited support
• Strong systems background, able to assess and improve the finance stack, not just work within it
• Confident presenting to Board and investors, and comfortable delivering uncomfortable truths early
• A bias to action over process for its own sake

What Success Looks Like in the First 6 Months

• Clean handover from interim FC fully absorbed, no dropped threads on the year-end audit
• Cash forecasting is reliable and trusted by leadership
• Basic controls in place where there were previously none
• Board packs are accurate, on time, and don't need translating by someone else

Reporting Line

Reports to CEO. Manages 1 Finance Associate.

Values in Action

The Finance Controller is expected to model and embed Pentatonic's values, both within finance and across the wider business.

Master the Fundamentals
We operate to a consistently high standard—but nothing is fixed. Excellence is always evolving.

Build finance foundations that are rock-solid—cash forecasting, controls, reporting—while treating every process as open to improvement.

Hold finance outputs to a consistently high standard, and keep raising that bar as the business scales.

Simplify and strengthen inherited processes rather than layering complexity on top of them.

Obsess the Details
Every pixel, sentence, and spreadsheet is a reflection of us.

Deliver Board packs, forecasts and models that are accurate to the last cell—the details are where credibility is won or lost.

Catch the small errors before they become big problems: reconciliations, assumptions, version control.

Treat every output—internal or investor-facing—as a reflection of Pentatonic's standards.

You Are Where You Are
You represent Pentatonic in every room.

Show up to Leadership meetings, investor calls and team conversations with the same energy: curious, kind, and  a visible, approachable presence across the business—finance as a partner, not a gatekeeper.

Represent the company's numbers with honesty and composure, whatever the news.

Legacy Has Limits
Respect the past, but don't be ruled…