A 30 meur company doesn’t need the finance department of a 300 meur company. But it has usually outgrown whatever setup worked when the business was much smaller, and that gap is where things get messy.

This is an interesting stage for finance. There’s enough complexity now that accounting alone isn’t enough. Several legal entities, different mix of local tax and payroll setup, group reporting, forecasting, cash management, and a management team that’s suddenly asking sharper questions or at least needs better information on timely manner. But building a separate team or specialist for every one of those areas creates more cost and bureaucracy than value. What you want instead is a small core team with broad capabilities, backed by modern systems and external specialists where they actually add value.

Start with accounting that can be trusted

Before dashboards, AI, or clever forecasting models, the basic accounting needs to work. Clear ownership, sensible structures, reconciliations that happen on time, controls, and a close process that produces reliable numbers while they still matter.

A slow close usually gets blamed on reporting. Most of the time the reason can be found from a problem in the process when something gets stuck mid-month, a reconciliation happens too late, nobody quite owns a step. I don’t think every 30 meur company needs a two-to-six-day close. But management shouldn’t still be piecing together last month’s numbers when this month is half over.

Build one view of the group

International growth naturally creates different local finance realities. One country uses an outsourced provider, another has an internal accountant, payroll works a bit differently everywhere, and local rules genuinely do vary. Some of that’s unavoidable, and I wouldn’t try to flatten out local expertise just for the sake of tidiness.

But the group still needs common definitions, shared deadlines, and clear ownership sitting above all of it. Management shouldn’t need to understand all different local setups just to understand how the group is doing. Standardize what benefits from being standardized; leave local what has to stay local.

Don’t build everything internally

A company this size rarely needs every capability in-house. Local accounting, payroll, tax, and specialist questions are good candidates for an outside provider who deals with a given country’s rules every day. That might be often smarter than trying to build the same expertise internally from scratch.

But outsourcing the task can’t mean outsourcing the ownership. Someone inside the company still has to understand what’s being produced, push back on it when something looks off, and make sure the separate pieces actually add up to one finance function. This matters even more internationally as five accounting providers doesn’t add up to a group finance function on its own.

Forecast the business, not just the P&L

An annual budget plus monthly budget-vs-actual isn’t enough at this size. You need a rolling view of where the business is actually heading, and that doesn’t require an elaborate FP&A system, you just need to understand the drivers. What’s happening to sales. What the customer mix is doing to margin. How headcount is tracking against plan, and what a hiring delay does to the numbers.

Think of it this way: the budget was where you wanted to go. The forecast is where you now think you’re actually heading. It should move when your understanding of the business moves.

Cash needs its own view

Profitability and cash are related, but they’re not the same thing, and I wouldn’t assume the P&L forecast tells you enough about cash on its own. You need a separate, practical cash forecast. Whether how detailed depends on the business, but at minimum it should cover incoming cash, payroll and tax obligations, supplier payments, financing needs, and where the pressure points are likely to show up.

It doesn’t need to predict the bank balance six months forward to the euro. It just needs to give you enough warning to act before cash becomes the problem instead of a line on a spreadsheet.

Design the team around the work

I wouldn’t start by asking how many accountants or controllers a company this size is “supposed” to have especially as the ways of working are changing with the technology available. Start with the work instead: what has to happen locally, what genuinely needs internal judgment, what can be standardized, what systems can handle on their own, and what’s better left to an outside provider. The headcount question comes after that, not before it.

Adding a person solves a capacity problem. It’s a fairly expensive way to paper over a bad process. A small team can cover a surprising amount of ground once the processes, systems, and responsibilities are actually designed well. Also, just thinking that even thought the AI is taking huge steps and can support finance, if your finance processes and data isn’t in a good order building an AI layer there actually is an investment rather than just a decision on plug-n-play.

Finance needs to get out of finance

Once the basics are solid, a good chunk of the team’s time should go outside the historical finance work entirely. So transition to support in pricing, customer profitability, workforce planning, commercial cases, cost decisions, contract terms, scenario planning. This is where reliable accounting starts to pay for itself: finance already holds most of the information needed to understand the business. The job now is using it.

Management doesn’t need another spreadsheet just because finance is capable of producing one. It needs someone to explain what matters, why it’s happening, and what the alternatives actually are. This is a start for the transition on thinking how finance can evolve to be on the forefront of the business rather than recording historical information.

Give management a small number of numbers they’ll actually use

Reporting tends to grow along with the company, and I’m not convinced that’s progress. I’d rather have a management team that argues about a handful of meaningful numbers every month than one that receives a thick pack it opens once. Revenue and margin trends, the forecast, cash and working capital, headcount and capacity, and a few business-specific KPIs will tell you most of what you need to know.

The exact list will differ by company. The principle should be: fewer, better numbers. A good finance function doesn’t just make more information available. It helps people work out which information actually deserves their attention. Naturally this does not mean that finance would lack ability to go deep into the business logic and data. Something is off if the information which is actually needed, cannot be shown reliably.

Keep controls proportional

Growing companies need controls, not bureaucracy for its own sake. Payment approvals, access rights, reconciliations, audit trails, and clear responsibilities matter more as you add entities and countries but they should be built around actual risk, not built to look thorough. For example from audit point of view signing manual journals might be important, but that should be well justified as not just to create a bottleneck to the process.

The goal isn’t to stop anyone from doing anything without finance’s sign-off. It’s to make sure important mistakes can’t slip through unnoticed, while the business keeps moving at a reasonable pace.

What I’d actually optimize for

I wouldn’t judge a finance function by its headcount, its report count, or how sophisticated its systems look. I’d ask something simpler: can we trust the numbers, and do we get them fast enough to act on? Do we understand where the profit and the cash are actually coming from? Can we spot problems early, and does finance’s involvement genuinely make management’s decisions better? And can this setup handle the next stage of growth without being torn down and rebuilt?

At 20-40 meur, I wouldn’t try to build a miniature version of a large company’s finance department. I’d build a small function that does large-company-quality finance exactly where it matters.