Fractional CFO services, without the full-time hire.

Fractional CFO services give a business senior finance leadership on a monthly retainer instead of a six-figure hire. The work is a rolling 13-week cash flow model, a budget with monthly variance review, board and investor reporting, unit economics and pricing analysis, and a standing monthly strategy call.

There's a stretch in every growing business where the founder is doing CFO work badly and the lead bookkeeper is doing CFO work outside their remit. Revenue is past the seven-figure mark but a full-time CFO hire (six figures plus equity) feels premature. The result is decisions made without the financial rigour they deserve: pricing without unit economics, hiring without runway analysis, fundraising without a defensible model.

CFO-as-a-Service was built for that exact stretch. You get a senior, ACCA-qualified finance partner who acts as your CFO: building the cash flow model, running the budgeting process, owning the investor relationship from the numbers side, and being available for the strategic decisions that justify the hire.

Unlike a fractional CFO who shows up four hours a month and forgets your context between sessions, our CFO engagement sits on top of a live management-accounts function that we run for you. The CFO knows your numbers because we close your books. There's no information gap, no week-long ramp-up before useful conversation.

The Managing Director leads the engagement personally. The monthly strategy call is an hour. The 13-week cash flow model is rebuilt weekly and reviewed monthly. Investor reporting is in their preferred format. Pricing analysis, cohort margins, unit economics, handled as part of the retainer, not as a separate quote.

The 13-week model is the centre of the engagement because it is the only forecast short enough to be checked against reality every week. It is built bottom-up from named receipts and payments, not from a revenue growth percentage: the eleven customers who owe you money and when each historically pays, payroll dates, VAT and Corporation Tax due dates, rent, the software renewals nobody remembers. Actuals are dropped in each Monday and the variance is explained. Two months of that and the model stops being a spreadsheet and starts being a decision tool. The method is written up in our 13-week cash flow template.

Statutory dates are part of the cash plan, not a separate compliance chore. UK Corporation Tax is payable 9 months and 1 day after the year end while the return itself is not due for 12, so a company that plans around the return date is three months late on the cash. Statutory accounts are due at Companies House 9 months after the accounting reference date. Those dates go into the model on day one.

A worked example of the runway arithmetic we run at every monthly call. A business holding $420,000 of cash, burning $70,000 a month net, has six months of runway. Hiring two engineers at $9,000 a month fully loaded takes burn to $88,000 and runway to 4.8 months, which is under the six-month floor most investors want to see at the start of a raise. The answer is rarely no; it is usually later, smaller, or funded by moving a price. That is the conversation a fractional CFO is for.

Typical signals that the engagement is due:

• Revenue past roughly $1m and a founder still building the board pack personally.
• A raise, a bank facility or a first acquisition inside the next nine months.
• Gross margin known at company level but not by product, channel or cohort.
• Cash surprises: a month where the balance was not what anyone expected.
• An investor asking for reporting in a format nobody owns.

The engagement sits on top of a live close, so it works best where we also produce monthly management accounts. Most of the businesses we take on this way are VC-backed startups and SaaS companies, where the reporting question is really a revenue recognition question. If you are still deciding whether the timing is right, start with how to know when you need a CFO, then see fixed-fee CFO pricing plans. Where a raise or exit is close, the due-diligence preparation work runs alongside. If you are comparing delivery models rather than providers, our virtual CFO vs fractional CFO comparison sets out how the two differ on pricing, continuity and scope, and which one suits a recurring need rather than a transaction. CFO work sits at the top of a stack that starts with clean bookkeeping, and that whole stack is set out in our directory of accounting, tax and advisory services.