Business Controller – Personnel & Overhead

As Business Controller – Personnel & Overhead, you help bol stay in control of costs, support business cost savings, and provide the business with a sparring partner to realize cost savings ambitions.

How do you make our customers happy?

By ensuring our cost management strategies measurably strengthen operational performance and financial resilience across the organization. As Cost Controller overseeing personnel and overhead, you translate detailed financial data into clear insights that drive cost ownership, spending discipline, efficiency improvements, and responsible resource allocation. You collaborate closely with Strategy, Finance, HR, Commercial, and Product & Tech leadership, as well as their Finance partners, to enable cost steering and fact-based decision-making. In doing so, you help the business scale in a financially sustainable way while safeguarding the quality and service our customers expect.

The biggest challenge

Maintaining a robust and forward-looking cost framework in an environment that changes at high speed. As a key player in an e-commerce market leader, you operate in a landscape where external market shifts and internal strategic choices can rapidly influence our cost base. Your biggest challenge is to safeguard clarity and control: ensuring that our fixed-cost framework remains stable, transparent, and actionable, even when the world around us moves fast.

You think several quarters ahead and continuously refine the underlying models that enable bol to anticipate what is coming our way. You translate both internal developments and external signals into reliable cost forecasts, ensuring that leadership can make confident decisions grounded in fact-based scenarios. At the same time, you remain responsive to high-pressure ad hoc requests that require sharp analysis without losing precision.

Your stakeholders — from operational leads to board members and finance leadership — expect engagement at every level. How do you keep the cost structure predictable when the business environment is anything but? How do you stay pragmatic, challenge assumptions, and maintain control without slowing the pace of the organization? And how do you balance long-term cost discipline with urgent, business-critical decisions, while keeping your models and insights fit for an environment that never stands still?

What you'll do as a Business Controller

As the cost controller you are part of the Product, Tech, Data and Cost Control team and together share the responsibility for personnel and overhead, you ensure that business initiatives are properly funded and that stakeholders remain accountable and well-informed about their budgets. Your insights help create a well-run financial environment that supports continuous improvement across the organization.

In this role, you maintain and develop our fixed-cost models, integrating new plans and developments into the cost base and keeping it closely aligned with actuals. You also safeguard budget adherence and act as a sparring partner for senior leadership with the MTs of P&, FOL, Strategy, ESG, and Communications. In addition, you work closely with Business Planning and the wider Controlling community to maintain an accurate and forward-looking view on personnel and other fixed-cost budgets.

Your main day-to-day tasks will be the following:

• Execute the period end close, budget and forecasting processes in your scope
• Build and upkeep cost models and drive standardization, automation, and dashboarding
• Facilitate the quarterly process with respect to bol wide resourcing requests
• Attend and contribute to various management teams focused on specific subject matter
• Help build business cases around, for example, cost saving initiatives
• Help innovate within our IT landscape to help visualize our data

Why you can make a difference

You excel in environments with competing priorities and know how to bring clarity through sharp analysis, sound business reasoning, and a strong data foundation. With a master’s degree in accounting, Finance, or Business Administration and 4–7 years of finance experience, you are confident navigating complex financial topics and eager to keep expanding your skill set.

You are energized by learning, comfortable working closely with data, and unafraid to step outside your comfort zone when the situation calls for it. Your accounting knowledge is solid, enabling you to handle key treatments — such as capitalization and accruals — with accuracy and confidence in the overhead domain.

3 reasons why this is (not) for you

Not for you if:

• Multitasking and structure are not for you: you cannot multitask, keep overviews, prioritize, and bring your work to the finish
• Passive business partner: you do not take initiative in pushing the business to do better and take financial insight into account
• Bad communicator: unable to bring forward your ideas and the implications they have on the business

For you if:

• Strategic business partner: you get energy from helping bring financial insights to the table and push the business into making financially sound decisions
• Stakeholder Management Pro: you are good at managing your stakeholders and their expectations
• Data machine: you have or are willing to put in the work to bring data to the table and drive data driven decision making

Where you'll work

You will join the financial heart of one of Europe’s most dynamic retail tech platforms. As part of the Product, Tech, Data & Cost Control team (4-5 colleagues), you help keep bol’s decisionmaking engine running smoothly — working closely with one other Cost Controller who shares a similar scope. Collaboration is in our DNA: we challenge each other’s thinking, bring clarity to complex topics, and push the business to perform better every day.

While we take our analyses seriously, our culture remains open, energetic, and supportive. We combine high performance with teamwork, reflecting our position as both an established market leader and a bold innovator.

With 2,900 colleagues serving millions of customers, your financial insights will have a substantial impact on both the business strategy and the customer experience.

Perks of having a blue heart

Flexible working

We bring the best of both worlds together by working 50% at the office and 50% at home. This way, we find a balance between organisational and individual needs.

The culture and the office

Our colleagues work hard to make the daily lives of our customers easier and more fun. But of course, we do this in an inspiring and creative environment!

The extras

To start your bol journey off right, you’ll receive a welcome package, a laptop, and even a noise-cancelling headset.