Hiring a Fractional CFO

Most Common Situations Or Problems That Warrant a Fractional CFO

1. Runway concerns: You do not have reliable cash visibility (runway feels fuzzy), and you need tighter forecasting and spending control.
2. Fundraising challenges: You are planning to raise money soon and want investor-ready reporting, metrics, and a defensible model.
3. Reporting problems: Your monthly close and reporting are inconsistent or slow, so leadership is operating without trusted numbers.
4. Planning problems: You need a budget and forecast that actually drives decisions, not a spreadsheet that gets rebuilt each month.

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How a Fractional CFO helps with solving those problems

1. Cash flow management: They build a cash view you can operate on (often weekly), tighten inflows/outflows, and improve runway accuracy so you can make spending and hiring decisions with more info that you’re armed with.
2. FP&A (budgets, forecasts, and models): They create a budgeting and forecasting process that leadership can reuse, connect it to key operating drivers, and turn it into a tool for decisions (headcount, pricing, growth tradeoffs).
3. Fundraising support: They prepare an investor-facing model and metrics, align the story across deck/model/financials, and get diligence materials organized so the process is faster and less disruptive.
4. Investor and board reporting: They standardize reporting (KPI definitions, monthly pack, variance explanations) so updates are consistent and stakeholders stop asking for one-off custom cuts of the numbers.
5. Accounting and reporting quality: They improve close and reporting quality by coordinating with accounting, cleaning up recurring issues, and ensuring financial statements are reliable enough to support planning and external reporting.
6. Business model refinement in complex industries: They translate sector-specific constraints (e.g., reimbursement, contracting, channel dynamics) into a clear revenue architecture, pressure-test pricing and unit economics, and align operating drivers to the model.

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Fractional FP&A Lead or a More Senior Fractional CFO?

A good way to decide is to separate “build” work from “lead” work. If you mostly need someone to execute defined deliverables (clean up models, produce forecasts, build dashboards, pull reporting together) and you already know what “done” looks like, a strong Fractional FP&A Lead can be enough. If you need someone to set direction, choose the right metrics, push back on decisions, manage stakeholders, and represent finance with investors or a board, you want a more senior Fractional CFO. In general, the more ambiguous the problem and the higher the stakes, the more you benefit from true CFO-level judgment.

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Under-Rated Use Case: AI Enablement

One of the coolest things we’re seeing Fractional CFOs do these days is upskilling your finance team on how to be more AI-fluent in day-to-day tasks, as well as deploying and implementing AI tools across the organization that can significantly accelerate your accounting and finance processes.

Read our case study about the Fractional CFO that upgrades every client’s tech stack.

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Fractional CFO Case Study

Primefocus Health came to Fractional Jobs looking for a Fractional CFO, but here’s the catch: they needed someone who deeply understood the remote patient monitoring space. We introduced them to Diana, who has spent two days per week with them for the past year. She’s helped them raise capital, define their business model, and collaborate with their parent company. Read the full case study here.

Fractional Jobs also helped:

1. Medly (edtech) hire a Fractional CFO for 10 hours per week.
2. MyosCorp (CPG) hire a Fractional CFO for 5 hours per week.
3. Hearth (SaaS) hire a Fractional CFO for 20 hours per week.

All with similar results.

Get help hiring a Fractional CFO for your startup or SMB, learn more here.

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