Controller Job Description Template 2026

Last updated: October 3, 2026

By Jennifer Burdick, Recruiting Manager, KORE1

A controller job description should state how many entities the books cover, whether the statements are compiled, reviewed, or audited, the close target, the ERP, the team size, what the controller signs, and the pay range. Base pay for most controller seats runs from $115,000 to $235,000 in 2026, with public-company roles above that. Leave the scope out and the posting fills up with bookkeepers while the people who could run your close scroll past.

Controller searches have been a steady part of my work for all thirteen of my years at KORE1, and most of them start with a posting somebody else already wrote. I read it before I read anything else about the company. Every time. It usually tells me why the search is stuck.

In March of last year a family-owned almond processor in Modesto, California, asked us to look at a controller req that had gone stale. About $70 million in revenue. A packing company, a separate hulling entity, and a land company the owners kept on the side. Three sets of books. The bank that carried its seasonal credit line had just told the CFO that for the coming fiscal year it wanted audited financial statements, not the reviewed statements it had taken for a decade.

The posting mentioned none of that. It said “Controller,” asked for “5+ years of accounting experience, advanced Excel, QuickBooks a plus,” and promised a “fast-paced environment.” Seven weeks, 164 applicants. Most were staff accountants and full-charge bookkeepers, and several of them were good at that work. Not one of them had carried a company through its first audit.

The CFO and I spent two phone calls on it, and she did most of the talking, because she knew every fact the posting needed and had simply never been asked to write them down. Three entities. Reviewed statements for ten years, audited from the coming year on, with the bank’s date attached. A close that finished on business day twelve and needed to finish on day seven. Three people on the team, one of them part time. Sage Intacct. A base range of $150,000 to $180,000. The title grew a parenthesis, “Controller, Three-Entity Agricultural Processor (First-Year Audit, Sage Intacct),” and the applicant count shrank to thirty-one.

She hired the fourth person she interviewed, an assistant controller from a dairy cooperative in Visalia who had spent five years in public accounting, the last two as an audit senior. $168,000. Her first day was five weeks after the rewrite went up.

That is the usual result when we fix a controller posting, and it is the reason our controller staffing and recruiting team wants to see the posting before almost anything else. Which kind of controller you need is a separate decision, and our controller hiring guide already sorts the versions of the job. I am picking up after that choice is made, when somebody has to put it in writing.

I should say what I get out of this. KORE1 is paid when one of our candidates becomes your controller, and a posting that states its scope clearly will sometimes fill the seat with no recruiter involved. I would still rather you have the clear posting. It is better for everyone.

What the Word Controller Hides

A controller runs a company’s accounting function. The job covers the monthly close, the general ledger, financial statements, internal controls, the audit or review, and usually the accounting staff, with tax and treasury attached at smaller companies. Most controllers report to a CFO, or to the owner when there is no CFO.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics files controllers under financial managers, a group with a median annual wage of $166,570 in May 2025 and projected employment growth of 10 percent from 2025 to 2035. That is one median for a title that covers a single-entity services firm on QuickBooks Online and a corporate controller consolidating fourteen subsidiaries for a public parent. Same word. Different careers.

Candidates know this better than most hiring managers do. An experienced controller reading your posting is trying to answer three questions in under a minute. Is this my size of company? Is this a job I have already done, or the one I want next? Will I be fixing something or keeping it running? Those are the questions.

Adjectives cannot answer any of those. “Detail-oriented” and “hands-on” appear in nearly every controller posting I see, and they tell a candidate nothing she could not have guessed. Facts do. Six of them, specifically.

Six Lines Your Finance Team Could Write Today

Every one of these is already known inside your finance team. None of them is confidential in any way that matters to a competitor. Yet they are missing from most postings, usually because the person drafting the req was working from an old template instead of from the books.

The last column is the part to copy. Those sentences are short, they are checkable, and a good candidate will read them twice.

A word on the second row, because it trips up more postings than the other five combined. Some companies think of “audit” as a yearly event, something the outside CPA firm does in March. Candidates think of it as a job requirement. A controller who has only worked with reviewed statements has never sat through inventory observation, never built a schedule for an auditor’s request list, and never negotiated a proposed adjustment. That is not a criticism. It is a different set of experience, and the posting is where you say which set you need.

Reviewed, Audited, or Neither

Three levels of outside work show up on a private company’s financial statements, and each one asks something different of the controller. Compilations and reviews are governed by the AICPA’s accounting and review services standards.

• A compilation is the outside accountant presenting management’s numbers in financial statement form. No assurance at all. Nobody tests the controller’s work.
• A review gives limited assurance, built mostly from inquiry and analytical procedures. The CPA firm asks why margins moved and why receivables grew, and the controller answers. Many lenders accept reviewed statements below a certain loan size.
• An audit gives reasonable assurance, and that means evidence. Lots of it. Confirmations sent to customers and banks, inventory counts observed, samples of invoices traced back to shipping documents, and a list of requests that can run past two hundred lines in the first year.

Public companies sit one step further out, with an audit under PCAOB auditing standards and, for most of them, management’s own assessment of internal control over financial reporting under Sarbanes-Oxley Section 404. A controller who has lived through that will look for it in the posting, and one who has not will usually rule herself out when she sees it.

Put the level in the posting, plus anything about to change. “Our statements are reviewed today, and our lender will require an audit for fiscal 2025” did more work than any other line the Modesto posting gained. It told audit-experienced candidates that the job was built for them, and it told everyone else, politely, that it was not. Our controller salary guide shows what that sentence does to the pay band. No other line on this page moves the band as much.

Print the Close Day

Every controller candidate asks the same thing on a first call. What day does the close finish? Nobody writes it in the posting. Nobody. They should.

Give two numbers. The business day the books close today, and the business day you want them to close a year from now. If those are the same number, say that too, because some candidates want a steady close they can protect and others want one they can rebuild. Both are honest. Both are common. The posting lets each of them find the right job.

A precision machining company in Wichita, Kansas, that makes structural parts for business jets found this out over four months. Its posting called the role “a chance to drive process improvement in a fast-paced environment.” The close actually ran to business day fifteen. Inventory costing was done in spreadsheets outside the ERP, and the work-in-process count lived in a supervisor’s notebook. The first finalist we sent withdrew after the second interview. She had nothing against the work. She felt she had been told about it too late. Fair enough.

The company rewrote three sentences. “Our close finishes on business day 15. We want it on day 8 by next December. Most of the gap is inventory costing, which still runs outside Epicor.” The next slate had four candidates, and all four had moved a manufacturing close off spreadsheets before. One of them had done it twice. He got the offer. He took the job, and the last time I checked, the close was running on day nine.

If you are not sure where your own close stands, our month-end close replay diagnostic walks back through a recent close step by step. Run it before you write the posting, so the number you print is the real one and not the one somebody hopes for.

What the Controller Signs

Almost no controller posting says what the person will sign. Senior candidates ask about it early. Some decide on the answer alone.

Start with the representation letter. In an audit, the auditor asks management for written representations, in a letter dated the same day as the audit report, saying the statements are management’s responsibility, that the auditor got all relevant information, and that every transaction is recorded. The AICPA standard on written representations, AU-C section 580, says the request goes to management with appropriate responsibility for the financial statements, and notes it may come from the chief executive and chief financial officer or their equivalents. At a lot of mid-size companies, the controller is that equivalent. Sometimes she signs alongside the CFO. Sometimes instead of one.

The rep letter is only the first signature. There are usually three or four more.

• The bank’s quarterly compliance certificate, which states in writing whether the company met its covenants. Somebody signs that every ninety days.
• Bank authority. Can the controller release an ACH batch or a wire, or only build it for someone else to approve? Candidates who came up through internal control work will ask, because the answer tells them how segregation of duties really works in your office.
• Payroll tax filings and state sales tax returns, unless an outside firm files them.
• At a few companies, reports to a grant agency or an insurance carrier. Rare, but worth a line when it applies.

Santa Clarita, California, is where I learned to ask about the second one. A medical device distributor there had a finalist with eleven years at a much bigger competitor, and in the last round she asked whether the controller signed the covenant certificate. Yes, they said. So she asked how much room the company had on its fixed-charge coverage ratio. Silence, for a few seconds too long. The honest answer was “less than we would like.”

She did not walk away. She asked to see the last four certificates and the name of the banker, spent a Saturday with them, and accepted the offer knowing what her signature would be attached to. Afterward the CFO called me. Two earlier finalists had dropped out late, without much of an explanation, and he now thinks this was it. Neither of them had asked. Both had probably wondered.

One sentence handles it. “This role signs the quarterly covenant compliance certificate and the audit representation letter with the CFO, and approves ACH and wire releases above $25,000.” Or the opposite, if that is your structure. Both structures are common. The silence is what costs you finalists.

The Range Comes From the Scope

Once the six facts are written down, the pay range mostly picks itself. These are the 2026 base bands from our salary guide, and they track the scope lines above closely. Bonus targets climb with them, from roughly 5 to 10 percent of base at the bottom of the table to 20 to 35 percent, plus equity, at the top.

Look at what moves a row. Scope does. Entity count, the audit, and public reporting move the band. Years of experience barely appear. A controller with fifteen years on a single-entity, unaudited ledger is priced in the second row, and one with eight years who has carried a multi-entity audit is priced in the third. Write the posting for the row you are actually in.

Printing the range is no longer optional in much of the country, either. Massachusetts joined the list of pay transparency states on October 29, 2025, and now requires employers with 25 or more employees to disclose a pay range in job postings, defined as the salary range the employer reasonably and in good faith expects to pay. Plenty of other states have similar rules, and a remote posting can reach applicants in all of them. Print the range. Always. A controller candidate reads a posting with no range as either a lowball or a budget still under debate, and she is usually right about one of the two.

To price a single seat in a specific city, check it in the free KORE1 salary benchmark assistant first, so finance starts from a number with some support behind it.

Controller Job Description Template

Every bracket below can be answered from three documents your team already has, the trial balance, the credit agreement, and last year’s close checklist. Bracketed lines that open with “Note” are written to your hiring team, not to candidates. Take them out before the posting goes live.

Job Title

[Controller / Corporate Controller / Plant Controller / Assistant Controller], [industry or company type] ([number] entities, [audited / reviewed / first-year audit], [ERP]) [Note: The parenthetical does more filtering than the rest of the posting put together. Keep it, even if it looks long.]

About the Company and Its Books

[Company] is a [family-owned / private equity backed / venture backed / public] [industry] business doing roughly [$ revenue] a year, with [N] employees across [locations]. The books cover [N] legal entities [in N currencies]. Our financial statements are [compiled / reviewed / audited] by [outside firm type], and [nothing is changing / our lender will require an audit beginning fiscal [year] / we expect to begin a sale process or capital raise in [year]].

The Work

• Run the monthly close, which currently finishes on business day [N]. The goal is business day [N] by [date].
• Own the general ledger, account reconciliations, and the monthly financial package for [CFO / CEO / owners / board]
• [Prepare for and manage the annual audit / manage the year-end review] with [outside firm], including the request list and proposed adjustments
• Maintain internal controls over [cash / revenue / inventory / payroll], including segregation of duties in a team of [N]
• [Consolidate [N] entities and eliminate intercompany balances / manage the inventory subledger and standard costing]
• [Coordinate with our outside tax preparer on federal and state returns / prepare sales and use tax filings in [N] states]
• [Lead the move from [current system] to [new system] / keep [ERP] configured as the business changes]

Who Reports to You

[N] people. [Example: an accounting manager, two staff accountants, and an AP specialist.] [Note: If the team is one part-time bookkeeper, say so. A controller who wants to build a team will be glad to hear it, and one who wants to inherit a team will be glad to know before the first call.]

Systems

[ERP and version], [reporting or consolidation tool], [AP automation], [payroll provider], and Excel. [Note: Name the systems you run today, not the ones you are thinking about. If a migration is planned, say which system, when, and whether this person picks it.]

What You Sign

This role [signs / co-signs with the CFO] the audit representation letter and the quarterly covenant compliance certificate for [lender], and [approves / prepares but does not approve] ACH and wire releases [above $amount]. [Note: Candidates ask about this in the second interview at the latest. Answering it here saves a round.]

Qualifications

• [N] or more years in accounting, including at least [N] years owning a monthly close
• Experience with [a financial statement audit / multi-entity consolidation / inventory costing / ASC 606 revenue recognition] [Note: Pick the two that match your books. Listing all four describes nobody.]
• Hands-on work in [ERP or comparable system]
• Bachelor’s degree in accounting or finance
• [CPA preferred / active CPA license required because [reason]] [Note: Require it only when the audit committee, lender, or board actually expects it.]

Helpful but Optional

• Public accounting experience at the audit senior level or above
• [Industry experience: agriculture / aerospace / distribution / software / healthcare]
• A system implementation you led from selection through go-live

Compensation and Benefits

$[low] to $[high] base salary, plus [bonus target as a percentage of base] [and equity, if offered]. [Benefits: health, retirement match, paid time off.] [Note: The range should match the row of the pay table your scope puts you in, and in many states the law requires a good-faith range anyway.]

Where and When

[On site in [city] / in the [city] office [N] days a week / remote within [states or time zones]]. [Note: Say whether the close or year-end requires extra in-office days, and whether there is travel to other entities or plants.]

Edits the CFO Made in the Margin

How long should a controller job description be?

Somewhere around 600 to 900 words is long enough to state the six scope facts and the template sections, and short enough that a candidate reads all of it on a phone.

Length is rarely the problem. Padding is. Most controller postings that underperform are long, and they are long with duty lists copied from somewhere else. Cut duties before you cut facts.

Can we call it Controller if most of the work is bookkeeping?

You can, but a Controller title on a bookkeeping job draws people who expect to run a close and manage a team, and the ones you hire tend to leave within a year once they see the actual work.

Accounting manager or senior accountant is often the honest title, with a path to controller written into the posting if the company is growing toward it. People take that job happily when it is described plainly.

Should we admit the close runs late?

Put the real business day in the posting, because a strong candidate will learn it in the first interview anyway and will trust you more for saying it first.

A late close is not a weakness in a posting. For the right controller, it is the job. Plenty of strong controllers go looking for a broken close on purpose, because fixing one is the work they enjoy.

Does “CPA required” belong in the posting?

Only when an audit committee, lender, or board actually expects the credential; otherwise “CPA preferred” keeps strong operators in the pool who simply never sat for the exam.

Our salary guide covers what the license is worth on the band. On the posting side, the cost of requiring it unnecessarily is the candidates you never hear from, which is a cost nobody measures.

Do we have to publish a salary range for a controller role?

In a growing number of states you must, including Massachusetts, where employers with 25 or more employees have had to post pay ranges since October 29, 2025.

Even where it is not required, a controller posting without a range draws fewer experienced applicants. Most of them have seen enough postings to assume the missing number is a low one.

We need someone for six months, not forever. What goes in that posting?

$85 to $150 an hour is the usual range for interim controllers, and the posting should also give an end date, the specific deliverable, and who takes over the work when the engagement ends.

Interim work fits a first-year audit, a sudden departure, or a system cutover. Our contract staffing team fills those seats quickly. If the job is permanent from the start, direct hire staffing is the better fit, and if it turns out the posting is really for the person above the controller, work from the CFO job description template, which is built for that seat.

Write the Posting the Way You Want the Books Kept

The Modesto controller finished her first audit in February. Two proposed adjustments. Both small. The bank renewed the line a week later. In August the CFO asked her to write the posting for a new accounting manager. She led it with the close day and the entity count. Nobody suggested it.

That is the standard I would hold any controller posting to. It should be stated precisely, it should agree with itself, and someone outside the company should be able to tie every claim back to something real. That is what a controller does for a living, so it makes sense that it is also what one notices first. Once the posting is up, our controller interview questions cover how to test the people it brings in.

Once you have a draft, bring it to our accounting and finance recruiters and we will tell you who it is likely to reach. Controllers are one of the seats our accounting and finance staffing group fills most often, nationally, as permanent hires, interim engagements, and contract-to-hire. Retention across our placements at the one-year mark is 92 percent. For a controller, that means a full fiscal year closed with the company, audit and all.