Common questions, straight answers.

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.

That's up to you. Because we run the full back office, we can take the function over entirely, and for most owners that is the point: one team, one number to call, nobody pointing at anybody else.

If you have a bookkeeper who is genuinely good, we will happily work alongside them and layer the CFO work on top. For larger businesses with someone internal, the usual answer is to keep them on the day-to-day transaction flow and let us own the close, the reporting and the decisions.

Because a forecast is only as good as the record feeding it. If we are accountable for your cash projection, we should be accountable for the payables and the payroll that drive it — otherwise every month starts with reconciling someone else’s guesswork and calling the result insight.

The practical version: when a number looks wrong, there is one place to ask. Split the function across a bookkeeper, a payroll provider and an advisor and you get three parties, three partial views, and nobody who owns the answer.

Typically $1M to $50M 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 roughly $50M, the complexity and pace usually warrant a full-time finance team in the building.

In between is where this makes the most sense. The decisions are consequential enough that getting them wrong is expensive, but a full-time CFO runs $250K+ in salary before you add benefits, bonus, and the accounting staff underneath them. You get the same function, and the judgment on top of it, for a fraction of that.

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.

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.

Yes, in both engagements. Payroll processing, AP and bill pay, AR and invoicing with collections follow-up, and 1099 preparation are standard scope, not add-ons priced later.

That is deliberate. Those are the functions that actually determine your cash position, and splitting them across three providers is how businesses end up with nobody accountable for the number that matters. Approval limits stay yours — we run the process, you keep control of who can authorize what.

Yes — that is the Bookkeeping engagement. Same team, same standard, same 24-hour response, and the same full back office: categorization and reconciliation, a real monthly close, P&L and balance sheet, AP and bill pay, AR and collections follow-up, payroll processing, 1099s, chart of accounts design, QuickBooks setup or cleanup, and a year-end close your CPA can work from.

What it does not include is the layer on top: the 13-week cash forecast, the CFO report, the modeling, and the standing session where we decide what to do. Most owners who start here eventually want that interpretation, and moving up is a conversation rather than an onboarding.

QuickBooks for most engagements, and setup, migration or cleanup is included rather than billed as a project. We work inside your existing payroll and billing systems where they are serviceable, and we will tell you plainly when something needs to be replaced instead of worked around.

If a full ERP selection or implementation has to happen before the function can run properly, that is its own project and we will scope it as one.

No. We do not provide tax filing, audit or attest work, and we will not pretend otherwise to keep an engagement whole.

What we do is close the year in a form your CPA can work from and coordinate with them directly through the year, so tax planning happens against numbers that are already right. Most clients find their CPA’s job gets easier and cheaper. If you need a CPA, we will point you to people who do it well.

The accounting work runs continuously — payables, payroll and categorization do not wait for a meeting. On top of that, every engagement runs the same monthly cadence: the close lands on a published date, the CFO report and the refreshed 13-week forecast follow, and then we sit down together and decide what to do about them. Once a quarter we go deeper against the budget.

What matters more than hours is rhythm. The cadence does not flex by engagement size, because the value comes from context, and context only accumulates if we are in your numbers every month. By month four the advice stops being general.

Between all of that, questions get an answer within 24 hours. Ad hoc requests are part of the fee, not a change order.

Within 24 hours, both engagements. Reach out and you get a real answer inside one business day — not an acknowledgement now and an answer next week.

Ad hoc questions are part of the fee. What did we pay that vendor, which client is actually profitable, what is sitting past sixty days — ask, and it comes back in plain English.

We price a finance function to the business, not from a rate card, so the honest answer is that it depends on what you have and what needs fixing. Volume, entity count, payroll complexity and the state of the current record all move it.

What we can tell you: it is a fixed monthly fee against a defined scope, never hourly. You know what you are paying before the month starts, and you never have to wonder whether a phone call is going to cost you something. You will have a real number on the first call, once we know what we are looking at.

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.

We refund your most recent payment — either engagement, no matter how long you have been a client, and we do not ask for the work back.

Concretely: if a month’s books come back late or wrong, that month is refunded. If you are four months into Partnership and the CFO work is not changing how you decide, month four is refunded. The risk of finding out sits with us, not you.

We run a waitlist. Standing up a finance function properly is front-loaded work, and we will not run more onboardings at once than we can do well. When the calendar is full, new clients start in the next open slot.

Applying costs nothing and holds your place. If the timing does not work for you, we will say so on the first call rather than stretching ourselves and doing it badly.

Effectively, yes — but it is not a separate purchase. Every engagement opens with a full diagnostic of your numbers and systems, because we will not quote a finance function blind or write a scope from a discovery call. It is phase one of onboarding, included in the engagement.

If you are not ready to hand over the function, you can buy the Checkup on its own as a fixed-fee diagnostic with no ongoing commitment. Join within 30 days of the debrief and that fee rolls fully into your first month.

Read access to your books, bank, payroll and billing systems. An hour or two of questions about how the business actually runs, which is usually the most valuable part of onboarding. Introductions to your CPA, your banker, and anyone currently touching the books. And decisions from you on approval limits — who can authorize what, and at what dollar amount.

Onboarding asks real time of you for a few weeks. After that it is the monthly session and whatever approvals you have chosen to keep.

The Checkup takes two to three weeks from kickoff to written findings. Cleanup and build is typically the following 30 to 60 days, depending on how far behind the record is and how many systems have to move.

From there the monthly rhythm holds: close, report, forecast, decide. If your situation is genuinely complicated — several entities, years of backlog, a system that has to be replaced first — we will tell you that up front rather than discovering it in month three.

No. It is the most common starting point we see, and fixing it is built into how engagements begin.

Cleanup is phase two of onboarding: we restate and reconcile the prior periods, rebuild the chart of accounts around how you actually operate, and bring the record current before anything gets reported off it. Bad data is not a reason to delay. It is usually a symptom of the same underlying problem making your decisions hard, and we would rather see the mess than have you spend six months tidying up before you get help.

The one thing we do not do is a cleanup as a standalone job. The point of correcting the record is to run the business on it afterwards, so cleanup comes as part of an ongoing engagement rather than on its own.

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.

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.

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.

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.