Fractional CFO & Controller

Fractional controller and CFO work for businesses that have outgrown bookkeeping and cannot yet justify a finance hire.

A 30-minute consultation is $150, credited against your first engagement if you go ahead with us.

The Numbers Are Right. Nobody Is Reading Them.

Bookkeeping produces a record. It does not close the month, catch what was miscoded before it reaches a tax return, or tell you what the record means. Most owners find this out the same way: the books are technically current, and no decision has been made from them in a year.

The usual answers are both bad. Hire a full-time controller and you are carrying a salary the business cannot yet support. Hire nobody and you run on a bank balance and a feeling.

Where this sits between a bookkeeper and a CFO

A bookkeeper records what happened. A controller owns whether it is right — the close, the reconciliations, the reporting. A CFO owns the decisions the reporting drives: pricing, cash, structure, what a lender will fund.

At small-business scale one person does the last two, on a standing weekly rhythm, and that is what this engagement is.

What a Controller Engagement Covers

Scoped to the business before anything starts. Not every engagement includes every line.

A close that lands on a date

Month-end closed to a schedule you can plan around, not whenever it gets finished. You know when the numbers arrive because it is the same week every month.

Review of the transaction record

Uncategorized and miscoded items caught while they are still cheap to fix, rather than in March when they have become a wrong return.

Reporting you will actually read

Profit and loss, balance sheet and cash, with a short written note on what moved, why, and what it means. A statement nobody reads is a statement nobody needed.

Cash forecasting

A rolling thirteen-week view of cash, kept current, so payroll dates and tax dates stop arriving as surprises.

Receivables and payables

The aging reviewed rather than just produced — who is late, what is about to fall due, and how both land on the cash forecast. A cash surprise is usually already visible in an aging nobody opened.

Margin and unit economics

What each product, channel, location or job actually earns once everything is loaded into it — usually the number that changes a decision.

Budget and variance

A budget built with you, then the monthly comparison against it, with the differences explained rather than listed.

Lender and investor packages

The financial package a bank or an investor asks for, prepared and explained before the meeting rather than after the questions.

Owner compensation and structure

Reviewed alongside the tax position rather than separately from it, because a salary decision and a tax decision are the same decision.

How the work is actually delivered

Transaction-level bookkeeping runs on software. It categorizes what it can, and every week we review what it could not categorize and correct what it got wrong. Everything above that line — the close, the reconciliations, the reporting, the forecast, the advice — is done by a CPA, and it is the same CPA every week.

We say this plainly because it is the reason the engagement costs what it does. You are not paying a person to type in transactions. You are paying for the judgment applied to them.

If you already have a bookkeeper you are happy with, keep them. The controller work sits on top of whoever is doing the data entry, and we would rather review someone else's ledger than displace a relationship that is working.

What a Week Looks Like

The rhythm matters more than the deliverable. A monthly report that arrives three weeks late is a history lesson.

Transactions flow in and are categorized during the week.
We review the exceptions — anything the software could not place, and anything it placed wrongly.
Reconciliations are kept current rather than caught up at month-end.
You get a standing weekly slot. Questions get answered in that slot instead of accumulating.
At month-end the close runs, the statements go out, and the note explains what changed.
Quarterly, we look further out: cash, margin, structure, and anything with a filing date attached to it.

How it is priced

A fixed weekly fee, agreed in writing before any work starts, scoped to the size and complexity of the business. Not hourly — so a phone call in the middle of a decision costs you nothing, which is the only way advice actually gets asked for.

Cleaning up prior periods, if any is needed, is quoted separately as its own fixed fee, and you see that number before you commit to the ongoing engagement.