About Finance Control

At Finance Control our mission is to help our clients make timely financial decisions, based on accurate and real time facts.

OUR ORIGINS

Founded back in 2007, during the recession, ‘Stocktaking Control’ was originally created as a part-time business providing complete stock auditing and profit reporting for the licenced trade and hospitality industries.

I found that drawing on my own extensive professional experience in the hospitality sector, I was well able to help these types of businesses to thrive – in turn helping Stocktaking Control to grow from strength to strength.

As of 2021, we have now changed our name to ‘Finance Control’ and have expanded our offerings to also include Bookkeeping/Cloud Bookkeeping, Procurement and Purchasing Pricing, and Recipe/Menu Costing, alongside our established Stock Auditing services.

The main aim of this change is to be able to provide business owners with complete up-to-date knowledge of how their business is doing, without them having to wait until year end for those results – in turn giving them the best chance at financial recovery following the global Covid-19 pandemic.

As a small business we understand that repeat business is the only way to survive long term. As the founder of Finance Control, I make every effort to ensure our customers are satisfied with us in delivering results by helping them to focus on boosting profits margins and cutting costs.

Want to learn more?

If you’d like to know more about how Finance Control can help your business, simply contact us now, and we’ll be happy to walk you through the packages that we have available for your business, big or small.

CONTACT ME TODAY

Edward O’Donoghue - My Own Journey as the Founder

My own professional journey started out in the hospitality industry at a young age, working nights as a young boy, eager to be around my dad and to help him in any way I could.

Fast forward years later, just before my 20th birthday, and I was ready to take my first steps into Hospitality Management, having already worked my way up through various departments.

It was during this management position that I got the passion for figures by carrying out weekly stocktakes and then reporting the results to the general manager. This was great experience to get at such a young age.

Years later, myself and my now wife, Trish, left for Brixton, London in order to become Area Relief Managers for Allied Domecq Inns.

For those unaware, Allied Domecq Inns are the owners of 3,544 pubs in England. Also, the company is run completely by accountants who expect 13 profit and loss statements a year from each pub!

The position itself involved managing pubs, small hotels, and late-night venues short-term while the resident managers were on holidays. We also did this as part of the process of “holding relief” in establishments, usually while the main company appointed new managers.

Myself and Trish excelled in this field – so much so that following the holding relief of The Grove House in central London, and after providing such high-quality results, that the full-time management was given to us – something unheard of as a first full-time position with the company!

The Grove House eventually ranked in the top percentage of pubs for profits during our time there.

It is this experience, along with the other extensive industry experience I gained whilst working in London, as well as performing purchasing & procurement at the Castlerosse Hotel and Resort, and holding multiple managerial roles for the Sheahan Group in Killarney, that led me to setting up my own stocktaking and bookkeeping business.

This is the wealth of industry experience that I now use to help other businesses out of these trying times, post-Covid.

I can honestly say that from what I had learned while managing hospitality businesses in Ireland, I thought I knew a lot about Management and Stock Auditing – that is until I went to London.

It was in London, after full management training and the holding of the license of two pubs, that I realised the control systems in London were streets ahead of the systems in Ireland.

Educated by my experiences in both the UK and Ireland, I noticed a clear gap in the Irish market – there was a clear disconnection between businesses and the reports that they received from their advisors.

Instead of closely managing their finances on a regular basis, some businesses were unnecessarily waiting until year end to discover the answer to the dreaded question, “what do I owe the tax man?”

It was this that led me to obtain the qualification to be an Executive Partner with the Professional Bookkeepers Academy, so that I could fill that gap.

As a company strategy, at Finance Control we want business owners not to be afraid of results, but to instead embrace monthly reporting in order to manage their finances in a controlled fashion. We work hard and our clients trust us to deliver results in a down-to-earth, straightforward way.