Two of the three pages ranking for this subject tell you to ask for a ninety day plan and none of them shows one. Here is the plan, with the output named at the end of every block.
Read access to the books, the bank and the cards. The last two filed returns. The loan documents. Payroll access if there is payroll. One hour of your time to explain how the business actually makes money, which is almost never what the chart of accounts says. That is the whole list, and it takes most owners about ninety minutes to assemble.
Most published material on this subject is written for funded startups, so it leads with cap tables, investor models and a fundraise. If that is genuinely where you are, a fractional CFO who has run raises is the right hire and this is not that desk.
If you are pre revenue or newly funded and what you actually need is books that a future investor can read, a filed return, and a burn view that ties to the bank, the ninety days above is the same ninety days. The difference is that block four prices runway instead of a decision, and the tax position is mostly about elections rather than a bill.
No system migration. No new accounting software. No chart of accounts rebuild before the second close, because a rebuild on books nobody has read yet destroys the comparison you are about to need. Those come after ninety days if they come at all, and each one gets its own decision with a number under it.
Owners tell us afterwards that they were shopping for somebody to start immediately and what they actually wanted was a first ninety days that ended with the books trustworthy and the year planned.
What gets handed over is the closed month and the October number, and the return is prepared at the same desk. None of these ninety days requires anybody to be in the room with you.
You will be talking to the Steven Palmieri practice.