“Strategic financial guidance” is what every fractional CFO website promises, and it’s exactly the phrase that tells you nothing. Here’s the actual work — the documents produced, the meetings run, the decisions supported — so you know what you’re buying before you spend $3,000–$15,000 a month on it.
A month in the life (10-hour standard engagement)
The most useful way to understand the role is to watch a typical month:
Week 1 — after the close. Your controller or bookkeeper closes the prior month; the CFO reviews the financials, updates the KPI dashboard, and writes the two-paragraph “what happened and why” narrative that turns statements into information. (~3 hours)
Week 2 — cash. The 13-week cash-flow model gets refreshed with actuals: collections pace, payment timing, the honest answer to “are we fine through Q1?” If the answer is trending toward no, this is the week you find out — months early. (~2 hours)
Week 3 — the leadership meeting. The CFO joins your leadership or ops meeting with the numbers already digested: which customers drifted unprofitable, whether the new hire fits the plan, what the pricing experiment did to margin. (~2 hours)
Week 4 — the project. The rotating slot: this month a pricing analysis, next month lender-covenant prep, the month after a board deck. Over a year, these projects are where most of the compounding value accumulates. (~3 hours)
The deliverables catalog
Visibility
- 13-week cash-flow model — the flagship artifact: weekly cash position, updated on a rhythm, so runway is never a surprise
- KPI dashboard — the five to eight numbers that actually run your business, on one page, current
- Monthly reporting package — financials plus narrative, readable by a non-finance owner in ten minutes
Planning
- Annual operating budget — built with your team, not imposed on it
- Budget vs. actual reviews — monthly variance analysis that changes behavior, not a filing exercise
- Scenario models — “what if we open the second location / lose the big client / raise prices 8%”
Capital
- Board and investor packages — decks and financial appendices that survive partner-meeting scrutiny
- Fundraising support — the model, the data room, diligence defense, and a finance adult in the room
- Lender management — covenant tracking, bank relationships, refinancing timing
Economics
- Pricing and unit-economics analysis — where you’re leaking margin and what to charge instead
- Customer and product profitability — which revenue is worth keeping
- Compensation and hiring-plan modeling — what the org chart costs before you build it
What a fractional CFO does not do
This list matters as much as the catalog above, because mismatched expectations are the number-one reason CFO engagements disappoint:
- Bookkeeping — recording transactions and reconciling accounts is a bookkeeper’s job at a quarter of the rate
- The month-end close — owning accuracy and timeliness belongs to a controller
- Payroll administration — your payroll provider plus your bookkeeper handle it
- Tax preparation — stays with your CPA; the CFO coordinates, never replaces
- Miracles on bad data — a forecast built on unreliable books is expensive fiction; the ladder below the CFO has to work first
If the roles blur in your head, our Bookkeeper vs. Controller vs. CFO guide untangles them in one table.
How engagements are structured
Most fractional CFO work sells in monthly tiers — advisory (4–8 hrs), standard (8–15), embedded (15–30) — at $3,000–$15,000/month depending on depth; the full cost breakdown covers what drives the price. Engagements at Focused.Financial are month-to-month after an initial 90 days, with the CFO matched from our vetted bench by industry background — a SaaS company gets someone who has owned ARR models, not a generalist learning your metrics on your budget.
The bottom line
A fractional CFO’s job is to make your numbers mean something: cash you can see thirteen weeks ahead, a budget that argues back, reports a board takes seriously, and a pricing model that stops the leaks. Expect named artifacts within the first month — and if all you’re getting is conversation, you bought the phrase, not the job.