Somewhere there is a number on your desk that needs a decision, and nobody to make it with. Before you hire anyone for that, it helps to see what actually turns up each month, because that is the part almost nobody puts on a website.
Cash is tight and nobody can quite say where it went. Or somebody whose opinion matters, a lender, a big customer, has asked for numbers the business cannot produce. Or there's a decision sitting on the table, a hire, a second location, a price change, and no honest way to model it. Or the thing has simply grown past the point where one person can carry it all around in their head, which happens to almost everybody somewhere in the third or fourth year.
None of that is really a title problem, so we won't spend the page on the title. Fractional CFO Now was built for the question underneath it, which is what a fractional CFO actually hands you, and the fairest way to answer that is to show you the thing rather than talk about it.
There are six different wants hiding behind those two words, and they are not the same job at all. Working out which one is yours is worth about a month.
One of them sits outside all of this. If somebody has asked you for audited or reviewed statements, that belongs at a different desk, and there's a plain section further down that says so and points you at it.
Four pages, in the order you'd read them. Once the month is closed the whole package takes about six working hours to put together. On books that aren't closed it takes roughly twice as long and it's still partly a guess, which is why the close comes first and why nobody sensible sells you the forecast before the close.
The figures are yours, so you won't find them printed here. What you're looking at is the shape of the thing, and the shape is the part nobody publishes.
Page two is the one owners leave open in a tab. How the thirteen week view gets built, and what it reads from, has a page of its own.
Everything this site describes is work a person may do without a license, and it is what happens here every month. An audit, a review, a compilation or an opinion on your statements under GAAP is a different matter, because Texas keeps those for licensed firms and there is no CPA license at this desk.
So if a lender or an investor has asked you for a signed report, you will hear that inside the first twenty minutes and leave with the name of a firm that can sign it. The rest of what is out of scope, payroll runs and IRS letters included, is written out on the disclosures page.
If you're under roughly a million in revenue with one bank account and no payroll, what will change your year is a clean monthly close and one conversation in October. That costs a fraction of an engagement, and putting a strategist on top of it changes almost nothing.
There are three cheaper fixes and they go in this order. First, get the books closed every month by somebody who reconciles them to the bank. Second, have the return prepared by whoever is going to plan the year, so the planning and the filing are one conversation instead of two. Third, sit down once in October and price the year before it ends. When all three are already in place and the questions have outgrown them, that's the month the monthly read starts earning its money, and not much before.
We end up saying this on first calls more often than we sell anything. An owner who was told "not yet" and knew why tends to come back in a year, which suits everybody.
Being the only person who really knows the numbers is quiet work, and it doesn't stop at six o'clock. The reporting isn't what changes. What changes is that by the tenth of the month somebody else has already looked, already found the thing that moved, and is sitting there with one question instead of forty.
The seat has a name here, and it is Tax CFO. A Tax CFO is the controller and CFO seat for an owner run business with the tax work inside it, so the books, the return and the plan come from one desk and the October number is decided before the year ends. Two levels, both of them at the same desk. The controller level keeps the filings on their dates and the close tied out. The level above it decides what the year does, prices whatever choice is in front of you, and then prepares the return the choice eventually lands on. Owners who have had those split across two firms usually say the same thing, which is that nobody was ever quite sure whose job the gap was.
Two words cover what that seat is worth. Breadth is the books, the filings, the return and the plan coming off one desk, which is the closed month shown further up this page. Height is the read from the top of the finance pyramid, the October number, and the decision priced before anybody has to make it.
Owners say a version of the same thing at the end of a first call. They came looking for a part time executive, and what they were really after was one desk that closes the month, reads it with them, plans the year and files the return at the end of it.
So that is what gets handed over. A closed month, the October number, and the return prepared by the same people. It all arrives on a screen you already have open, which is why none of this needs a reception desk.
You will be talking to the Steven Palmieri practice.