Many business owners are not sure what they are buying when they hire a fractional CFO. Here is a month-in-the-life breakdown of our engagement model.
The most common reason fractional CFO engagements fail is unclear scope. Owners assume the CFO does everything; CFOs assume the team does most of it. Both are wrong, and a useful engagement starts with what shows up on the calendar each month.
Here's a representative month for a $12M client we serve today.
Week 1 — Close discipline & cash
- Drive month-end close with the controller (1.5 hours of working sessions, daily check-ins).
- Review and approve close adjusting entries.
- Refresh the 13-week cash forecast and review with the leadership team.
- Prep variance commentary on the prior month for the leadership meeting.
Week 2 — Reporting & insights
- Monthly financial review meeting with the CEO and operating leaders (90 minutes).
- Update the KPI dashboard with prior-month actuals and rolling trends.
- One deep-dive on a question the leadership team raised: usually pricing, margin, or a customer cohort.
- Lender or board update if applicable.
Week 3 — Forward-looking work
- Forecast refresh: rolling annual model updated with current quarter actuals.
- Scenario modeling on whatever big decision is in front of leadership: hire plan, capex, financing event, expansion.
- AR risk review with the controller.
- Vendor / contract review on the 1–2 largest spend categories.
Week 4 — Strategic & systems
- Quarterly: pricing review, contribution-margin analysis, or compensation/commission tuning.
- Annual on a slow rotation: refresh the operating plan, run the budget cycle, prep the audit.
- Always: mentor the controller and bookkeeper on something they will own next quarter.
What we don't do
A fractional CFO is not your bookkeeper, your AP processor, or your transaction-level accountant. We oversee that work, we hire and train into it, and we pull it together into decisions — but the day-to-day execution lives with the team. If you don't have one, we help you build it.
How to evaluate the engagement
After 90 days, you should have: a working monthly close calendar, a forecast you trust, KPIs you actually look at, and at least one decision that was clearly better because the CFO was in the room. If those four are not in place by day 90, the engagement is broken — and that's on the CFO, not on you.
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