Clean books tell you what happened. A fractional CFO helps you decide what to do about it — cash flow you can forecast, margins you understand, and a plan for what's next.
Most owners bring in a CFO not because something broke, but because the decisions got bigger than the information. If a few of these sound like your last quarter, it's probably time.
Revenue grew and profit didn't, and you can't say exactly why.
You couldn't confidently tell someone what your cash looks like ninety days out.
You're setting prices on instinct rather than on what each service actually earns.
A hire, a loan, a build-out, or an acquisition is on the table and you're guessing.
You have reports. You don't have anyone walking you through what they mean.
You've started thinking about what happens when you eventually step away.
Bookkeeping tells you what happened. A CFO helps you decide what to do about it. Both matter — but they're different jobs, and most growing businesses hit a point where the second one is the constraint.
A fractional CFO is a senior finance professional who works with your business part-time — the judgment of a chief financial officer, scaled to a company your size. Here's what that looks like month to month.
Abbey is a Certified Exit Planning Advisor (CEPA) as well as a CMA — so the plan for eventually selling or handing off the business isn't an afterthought bolted on at the end. It shapes the decisions you make years earlier.
You don't need perfect books or a finance department to begin. You need someone to look at what you've got and tell you the truth about it.
A working session on your numbers as they stand today — what they say, what's missing, and which two or three questions would change the most if you could answer them.
Forecasting, margin reporting, the KPIs that actually matter for your business. Built once, then maintained — so the information shows up without you chasing it.
A standing conversation about what the numbers are telling you and what to do next. Between sessions, you have someone to call before you make the call.
Most engagements run monthly or quarterly, sized to what's actually happening in your business. A company navigating a build-out or an acquisition needs more of us than one in a steady year — and we'd rather adjust the cadence than sell you a retainer you don't need.
A fractional CFO is an experienced chief financial officer who works with your business part-time instead of as a full-time employee. You get senior financial judgment — forecasting, margin analysis, planning, decision support — at a fraction of the cost and commitment of hiring someone into the role.
For most service businesses, a full-time CFO is both unaffordable and more capacity than they need. This is the middle path.
Bookkeeping is the record of what happened: transactions coded, accounts reconciled, statements produced. CFO work starts where that ends — interpreting those numbers, forecasting what's coming, and helping you make decisions about pricing, hiring, borrowing, and growth.
You need accurate books before CFO work means anything. But accurate books alone won't tell you whether to take on that lease.
No. Plenty of clients keep their existing bookkeeper or in-house team and bring us in purely for the advisory side — we'll even train your bookkeeper on what we need.
That said, the work goes faster when the underlying books are clean and current. If they aren't, we'll tell you that early rather than build forecasts on a shaky foundation. Our bookkeeping service is there if you'd rather have both under one roof.
Probably not, and it's the wrong question. The better one is whether you're facing decisions where being wrong would be expensive — a hire, a location, a price change, a loan, a buyer. That's the threshold, and plenty of businesses cross it earlier than they expect.
If it turns out you'd be better served by clean bookkeeping and a conversation in a year, we'll say so on the first call.
Flat monthly or quarterly pricing, scoped to the cadence and the work — not hourly, and not a percentage of anything. A business in a steady year needs less of us than one in the middle of an acquisition, and the engagement is sized accordingly.
You'll get an exact figure after a conversation about what you're actually facing.
Yes, and it's worth starting long before you plan to. Abbey is a Certified Exit Planning Advisor (CEPA), and the things that make a business valuable to a buyer — clean records, predictable margins, an owner who isn't the bottleneck — take years to build, not months.
Even if selling is a decade away or purely hypothetical, running the business as though a buyer might look at it tends to make it a better business to own in the meantime.
Abbey leads every engagement. She's who you meet on the first call and who you'll be sitting with month after month — more than twenty years of hands-on experience as a Controller, CFO, and Executive Director, applied directly to your business.
When an engagement calls for it — an acquisition, a financing, a complex restructuring — she brings in additional senior CFO expertise from our advisory network to work alongside her. You get specialist depth on the hard problems without losing the person who already knows your business. Nothing gets quietly handed off, and you'll always know exactly who's in the room and why.
Still deciding whether it's the right time? Talk it through with Abbey — no obligation either way.