Fractional CFOs near you

Start with whatever credential does exist. If they claim a CPA licence, confirm it with the issuing state board or through NASBA's licensee database, which publishes records from participating boards. If they will sign or prepare tax returns for you for a fee, they need a Preparer Tax Identification Number from the IRS.

Then check the experience against your actual situation. A CFO who has raised venture capital is not automatically the right person to renegotiate a bank facility, and someone who has run finance at a hundred-person company may be miscast at a company of eight. Ask for two references from companies at your stage and call them.

Finally, pin down what you will receive. A monthly reporting pack, a thirteen-week cash forecast, a board memo, a model that someone else can open and follow — name the deliverables and their dates in the engagement letter. Vagueness here is the most common reason these arrangements disappoint.

The first few weeks are diagnostic: reading the books, testing whether the close is reliable, listing what is missing and what is wrong. Expect an uncomfortable summary. If the first report tells you everything is broadly fine, either it is, or nobody looked properly.

The next phase is remediation. Reporting is rebuilt so that the same number means the same thing every month, the close calendar is fixed, and the forecast is stood up and then tested against reality for a few cycles until it stops being fiction.

Only then does the strategic work become useful. Pricing decisions, capital planning, hiring plans and investor conversations all depend on numbers people believe. Agree the cadence in writing — days per month, the meetings attended, what is on call and what is a new project — because an undefined fractional role tends to expand into an unbilled full-time one or shrink into nothing.

Some engagements are explicitly finite: get through a raise, survive a first audit, prepare for a sale, stabilise cash after a bad quarter. Those should have an end date written into them from the start and a handover plan attached.

Others run for years at a steady one or two days a month, which works well for companies whose complexity is flat. The warning sign in a long engagement is dependency: if nobody inside the company can produce or explain the monthly numbers without the fractional CFO, the arrangement has quietly become a single point of failure.

The natural end point is usually a hire. When the finance questions arrive daily rather than monthly, when investors expect a named executive, or when the company's structure has outgrown part-time attention, it is time to move to a permanent appointment — and a good fractional CFO will help you recruit their own replacement.