Virtual CFO. Finance leadership on retainer.

A Virtual CFO is not a standalone service — it is the reporting and decision layer above accounting and compliance. It depends on books that close on a date and a statutory calendar that is already owned, and it feeds the advisory work of controls, risk and transactions.

In practice, that means the retainer works best when the Finance pillar is running the monthly close and the Compliance pillar is running the statutory calendar. Where those are not yet in place, the diagnostic phase stabilises them first, because a forecast built on unreconciled books is a guess with a template around it.

The trigger is rarely turnover alone. It is the point at which decisions start to outrun the information available: a second entity or state, a first external lender, credit terms that stretch working capital, a pricing question no one can answer at segment level, or a promoter who has become the only person who understands the numbers.

At that stage the cost of a wrong decision exceeds the cost of the retainer. The engagement pays for itself through margin visibility, working capital release and avoided funding stress far more often than through cost savings on headcount.

Books close within ten working days. A management pack with variance commentary is circulated before the review meeting, not during it. Cash is forecast thirteen weeks out and revised weekly. KPIs are defined once and owned by named managers. Board and lender questions are answered from the same pack the business runs on.

That standard is the deliverable. Everything in the retainer — the calendar, the chart of accounts, the review cadence — exists to make it repeatable rather than heroic.