Common questions, straight answers.

A fractional CFO is a senior financial executive who works with your business on a part-time, ongoing basis. The work is forward-looking: cash flow forecasting, pricing and margin analysis, budgeting, financing strategy, KPI reporting, and helping you make the decisions that determine whether the next twelve months go well.

Where a bookkeeper records what happened and an accountant reports on it, a CFO helps you decide what happens next.

Your bookkeeper is essential and does work no one else should be doing. They record transactions, reconcile accounts, manage AP and AR, and keep the ledger accurate. Without clean books, everything downstream is guesswork.

The CFO's job starts where the bookkeeper's ends. Once the data is accurate, someone has to interpret it: Are we profitable on the jobs we think we're profitable on? Can we afford to hire? What happens to cash if a customer pays 30 days late?

A bookkeeper produces the record. A CFO produces the decision.

Your CPA's primary obligation is compliance and accuracy: filing correct returns, minimizing tax liability within the rules, and in some cases producing reviewed or audited financials. That work is specialized, time-sensitive, and non-negotiable.

But tax planning is largely backward-looking and annual. A CFO works in a monthly and weekly rhythm, on questions your CPA isn't engaged to answer: whether to take the loan, whether the new division is actually contributing margin, what your cash position looks like in week nine.

The two roles are complementary. Most of our clients keep their CPA and add a fractional CFO, and the CPA's job usually gets easier as a result.

A controller owns the accounting function: closing the books, financial reporting, internal controls, and managing the accounting staff. It's a management role focused on accuracy and process.

A CFO is a strategy role focused on capital, growth, and risk. In a large company, the controller reports to the CFO. In a business your size, you may need one, the other, or a fractional CFO who can cover controller-level work until you're big enough to hire a full-time controller.

Engagements generally run from $3,000 to $12,000+ per month, depending on the depth of involvement, the complexity of your business, and whether we're supporting an existing finance function or building one.

We bill on a fixed monthly fee tied to a defined scope, not hourly. You should know what you're paying before the month starts, and you shouldn't have to think about whether a phone call is going to cost you money.

Every engagement is scoped individually.

Hourly billing creates a conflict of interest: it rewards the advisor for taking longer and penalizes you for asking questions. Neither of those is good for your business.

A fixed monthly fee aligns us. We're paid for the outcome and the access, not the clock. If a problem takes half as long as expected, that's a win we both share.

Typically $1M to $20M in annual revenue.

Below roughly $1M, the questions are usually simpler than a CFO engagement can economically justify: a strong bookkeeper and a good CPA will serve you well. Above $20M, the complexity and pace often warrant a full-time CFO in the building.

In between is where fractional makes the most sense: the decisions are consequential enough that getting them wrong is expensive, but the volume of work doesn't justify a $250K+ salary plus benefits.

It varies by scope, but a typical engagement involves a monthly close review, a standing strategy meeting, ongoing forecast maintenance, and availability between meetings when something comes up. Higher-involvement engagements include weekly cash management, board or lender reporting, and active project work like a financing process or a system implementation.

What matters more than hours is rhythm. A CFO who's consistently engaged with your business every month builds context, and that context is what makes the advice worth anything.

Yes, in almost every case. The CFO relies on the bookkeeper's work. Trying to have a CFO do the bookkeeping is an expensive way to get transaction coding done.

What often changes is that the bookkeeping gets better, because someone is now depending on it. We'll frequently tighten up the chart of accounts, fix how certain transactions are categorized, and give the bookkeeper clearer standards to work against.

If you don't have a bookkeeper, we can help you find one or build that function.

No, but it changes where we start.

Cleanup is a normal first phase. Bad data isn't a reason to delay; it's usually a symptom of the same underlying problem that's making your decisions hard. We'd rather see the mess and fix it than have you spend six months tidying up before you get help.

A cash flow forecast projects the money actually moving in and out of your bank account over the coming weeks: not revenue, not profit, but cash.

Profitable businesses fail because of cash. You can win a large job, invoice on schedule, and still be unable to make payroll because your costs land before your collections do. A 13-week rolling forecast shows you that gap before it happens, when you still have options: adjust the payment schedule, pull a draw forward, delay a purchase, or draw on a line of credit you set up in advance.

Most of the "sudden" cash crises we see were visible eight weeks earlier. Nobody was looking.

This is the single most common question we get, and it usually comes down to one of a few things:

• Timing. You pay for labor and materials weeks before your customer pays you. Growth makes this worse, not better: every new job widens the gap.
• Working capital tied up. Cash is sitting in uncollected receivables, unbilled work, or inventory.
• Debt service. Principal payments reduce cash but don't hit the income statement.
• Owner draws. Distributions don't appear as an expense but absolutely appear in the bank balance.
• Your profit isn't real. Underbilling, missed change orders, or costs coded to the wrong job can make a business look profitable when it isn't.

Diagnosing which of these is the culprit is one of the first things we do.

Hiring decisions should be tied to a margin threshold, not a gut feeling about how busy you are.

The right way to model it: what does this person cost fully loaded, what incremental revenue or capacity do they create, and how long until the position is contribution-positive? Then stress-test it: what if that revenue lands 90 days late, or comes in 20% under plan? We build this out so you're making the call against numbers rather than a hunch.

Being busy is not the same as being ready to hire.

That's usually the real goal underneath the financial one.

Getting out of the day-to-day requires two things: a business that produces predictable cash without you touching every decision, and financial visibility good enough that you can be away and still know what's happening. Most owners are trapped by the second one: they can't step back because they don't trust the numbers unless they're the ones producing them.

Building that out means clean, timely financials on a reliable rhythm; KPIs that tell you the truth at a glance; a forecast that lets you see problems early rather than react to them; and a structure that supports how you actually want to own the business.

That's most of what we do.

Probably, and it's worth a conversation.

Multi-entity structures, intercompany allocations, unusual revenue recognition, project-based accounting, industry-specific reporting requirements: these come up constantly, and they're usually where the real value is. The complexity is exactly what makes generic financial advice useless to you.

Give us a call and describe the situation. If it's something we can help with, we'll tell you how. If it isn't, we'll tell you that too, and point you toward someone who can.