Finance leadershipWhen to hire a CFO, and when to rent one
Most businesses hire their first CFO too late, then discover they cannot afford the good ones. The signs you need senior finance leadership are consistent: the board asks questions the management accounts cannot answer, a fundraise or bank facility is on the horizon, or the founder is making pricing and hiring decisions on instinct because nobody has built the model.
A full-time CFO makes sense when those demands fill a week, every week. Until then, the work is real but lumpy: intense around board meetings, budgets and fundraises, quiet in between. That lumpy shape is exactly what a fractional arrangement fits. Two or three days a month of experienced judgement, at a fraction of a full-time salary, usually covers the strategic work while your existing team handles the day to day.
The honest test is this: write down the five finance decisions that worry you most. If they are about systems, accuracy or deadlines, you need a financial controller. If they are about direction, funding or what the board will ask next, you need CFO thinking, and you can rent it before you can afford to own it.
Financial controlClosing the month in five days, not twenty-five
If your management accounts arrive three weeks after month end, they describe history, not performance. By the time anyone reads them, the quarter has moved on. A slow close is rarely about effort. It is almost always about sequence and discipline.
The fixes are unglamorous. Reconcile the bank weekly, not monthly, so month end is a confirmation rather than an archaeology project. Set a cut-off for supplier invoices and accrue what misses it instead of holding the close open. Investigate suspense items the week they appear; a suspense balance that rolls forward is a problem compounding quietly. And publish a close timetable with named owners, because a deadline nobody owns is a suggestion.
Done consistently, a five working day close is achievable for most businesses without new software. The prize is not the speed itself. It is that decisions get made on numbers that are still warm.
AuditGetting audit-ready: what auditors actually look for
Audits go badly for the same reasons every year, and almost none of them are about fraud. They are about support: balances that exist in the ledger but cannot be evidenced, reconciliations done in December for the first time since January, and fixed asset registers that have not met the actual assets in years.
Auditors test whether the numbers are supported, so the preparation is simply to support them. Reconcile every balance sheet account and keep the workings. File the contracts, board minutes and loan agreements where they can be produced in minutes, not days. Match the payroll to the staff list, the revenue to the bank, and the stock count to the records before the auditors do it for you.
A business that closes its months properly is audit-ready by default. The year-end then becomes an exercise in confirmation, the fees stay down because the audit team finds order instead of archaeology, and the opinion arrives on time. Audit readiness is not a project in November. It is a habit in February.
