Standing up a finance back-office in Sofia

Template — replace with a real engagement. The structure below is what converts; substitute your own client, numbers and timeline before publishing.

A Nordic industrial group was consolidating the finance functions of TBC country operations into a single shared service centre in Sofia: accounts payable, accounts receivable, general ledger, and a small reporting team. Roughly TBC roles, against a migration calendar that had already been agreed with the country finance directors and could not move.

That calendar is the whole difficulty. A shared service centre does not need TBC people on day one; it needs a team lead and a first wave of accountants several weeks before the first country migrates, so that knowledge transfer has somebody to transfer to. Hire too early and people sit idle and start looking elsewhere. Hire too late and the migration slips, which in a finance function means a country closing its books late.

The market added its own constraint. Sofia has a deep pool of finance and accounting people, largely because of the SSC sector itself, but the good ones are inside that sector and know exactly what a new centre looks like from the inside: unclear processes, a manager hired last month, and no guarantee the centre still exists in three years. Senior candidates asked about the group’s commitment before they asked about salary.

We built the hiring plan backwards from the migration calendar rather than from the headcount, and agreed it with the client before starting: which roles must be in place before each country wave, and which can be filled after go-live without putting a close at risk.

The sequence

• Leadership first. The SSC lead and the AP and AR team leads were searched before anything else, and they interviewed everyone hired after them. Candidates want to meet their manager, not a recruiter promising one.
• Waves tied to migrations. Each subsequent group was hired to start TBC weeks before its country wave, so people arrived to actual work and a named knowledge-transfer counterpart.
• Language screened per process, not per team. The countries migrating first set the language requirements for the first wave; requiring every hire to cover every language would have shrunk the pool for no operational reason.
• System experience treated as a preference, not a filter. ERP familiarity was scored, not required. Screening for a specific system in a market this competitive removes strong accountants who learn it in weeks.

On the commitment question we did not try to talk around it. We asked the client for the group’s actual investment horizon for the centre and its plans for adding higher-value work later, and gave candidates both. TBC candidates withdrew on that information, which is the correct outcome — a controller who leaves after eight months costs far more than one who declines in week two.

The centre reached TBC people over TBC months and every country wave went live on the agreed date. Time to fill averaged TBC weeks for specialist roles and TBC weeks for the team leads, who were, as expected, the slowest.

Retention at TBC months was TBC percent, and TBC of the original leads were still running their functions at TBC months. TBC of the first-wave accountants had been promoted internally by then, which matters more than it looks: a shared service centre that cannot promote from within ends up re-hiring the same role every eighteen months.

The client has since moved part of the group reporting work to Sofia as well. That was not in scope for this engagement, and it is the outcome the honest answers about commitment were protecting.

Before publishing: replace this paragraph with what actually went wrong on the engagement and how you handled it. A case study in which nothing went wrong reads as marketing and buyers discount it.