Fractional CFO advisory, without the full-time hire

A fractional CFO does the financial thinking a full-time CFO would do, on a part-time schedule, for a part-time fee. The work is forward-looking. A bookkeeper closes last month; a CFO tells you what next quarter looks like and what to change now.

In practice that's nine jobs:

1. Cash flow forecasting. A 13-week rolling forecast that shows the week you get tight, far enough ahead that you still have options. It's the piece owners ask about first.
2. Profitability analysis. Which jobs, clients, services, or locations actually make money once real costs are allocated. Usually at least one answer surprises people.
3. Pricing and margin work. What a price change does to contribution margin and break-even volume, modeled before you send the new rate sheet.
4. Budget vs actual. A budget you set, then a monthly variance review that explains the gaps instead of just showing them.
5. Scenario modeling. Can you afford the hire, the truck, the second location? We model it three ways and show where each one breaks.
6. Lender and investor packages. Projections and statements assembled the way a credit committee expects to read them.
7. Financial projections. Revenue, expense, and cash projections built off your own history rather than a generic template.
8. Controller-level oversight. Month-end close review, reporting standards, and basic internal controls, so the numbers the strategy rests on are right.
9. Coordination. Talking directly to your CPA and your banker, so you're not the messenger between three professionals who've never spoken.

If you want the reporting layer without the strategy calls, that's our financial analysis and reporting service instead. Plenty of owners start there. And if you're not yet sure how to read what you already have, our guide on how to read a P and L statement is a better first step than hiring anyone.

Start with the honest part: there's no published Pittsburgh market rate for fractional CFO work. Most firms in this region don't post pricing at all, and most of the "Pittsburgh" numbers you'll find online are national ranges with a city name attached. Two things can actually be checked. What national firms publish, and what a full-time hire costs here.

Among the national fractional CFO firms that publish rates at all, retainers run from about $3,000 to $15,000 a month and hourly engagements land around $175 to $450 an hour. Most firms don't publish anything, so treat that as a guide rather than a survey. On the other end, the Bureau of Labor Statistics measures what financial leadership earns in this metro. Its Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics program put financial managers in the Pittsburgh, PA area, as of May 2025, at a median wage of $136,330 and a 90th percentile of $264,440, and the 1,660 chief executives counted here averaged $278,690. Those are straight-time gross pay. Payroll taxes, benefits, and any year-end bonus sit on top.

All in, the floor is $899 a month: $399 for the bookkeeping plus $500 for the advisory. That's the number worth comparing against a $3,000 standalone retainer, because the standalone retainer doesn't include anyone keeping the books.

Fair question if you've read our pricing page: why $899 and not just a bookkeeping plan? Because they answer different questions. Every plan, Growth included, is bookkeeping: reconciled accounts, a P and L and balance sheet by the 15th, and tax-ready books. The CFO add-on is the forward-looking work on top of that: the 13-week rolling forecast, the scenario models behind a hire or a second location, the pricing and margin math, and the lender package. If nobody is asking you those questions yet, a bookkeeping plan on its own is the better buy and we'll say so.

The reason ours starts at $500 isn't that the strategy work is worth less. It's that we're already in your books every month, so nobody's billing you to relearn your business. Our bookkeeping plans are published on our pricing page, which is more than most firms in this market will tell you before a discovery call.

These three get used interchangeably and they aren't the same job. The quickest way to tell them apart is by the question each one answers.

1. A bookkeeper answers "what happened?" Transactions categorized, accounts reconciled, statements produced. Backward-looking and non-negotiable. The IRS is blunt about why it matters. Good records "help you monitor the progress of your business, prepare your financial statements, identify sources of income, keep track of deductible expenses" and support what you report, per its recordkeeping guidance. Note the order. Monitoring the business comes first, ahead of the tax return.
2. A controller answers "are these numbers right, and are they on time?" Month-end close oversight, reporting standards, budget vs actual, internal controls. It's the layer most growing companies skip, and it's why their CFO conversations stall on "I'm not sure I trust this report."
3. A CFO answers "so what do we do?" Forecasting, pricing, capital, hiring, expansion, exit. Forward-looking, and only as good as the two layers below it.

You can't buy the third one and skip the first two. Strategy built on a file that hasn't been reconciled since March is just a confident guess. That's why we confirm the books are current before any CFO engagement starts, and why our monthly bookkeeping runs under the advisory rather than beside it. If your books are behind right now, catch-up bookkeeping is the first call, not this page.

Almost nobody wakes up and decides to hire a CFO. Something forces it. Here are the six triggers we hear most, and what each one turns into:

1. A loan or line of credit. The SBA requires 7(a) borrowers to "be creditworthy and demonstrate a reasonable ability to repay the loan." Its Working Capital Pilot program goes further and describes a good fit as a business that can produce timely and accurate financial statements, accounts receivable and accounts payable agings, and inventory reports. That's not our sales pitch. That's the SBA describing who the program is built for.
2. A pricing decision. You know you're underpriced. You don't know by how much, or what raising rates 8 percent does to the customers who leave. That's a model, not a gut call.
3. A hire you're not sure about. The next employee either unlocks capacity or eats the margin. We run it both ways before you post the job.
4. Cash is tight while revenue is up. Growth consumes cash, which is why this one catches people off guard. A rolling forecast shows you the squeeze six weeks out instead of the morning payroll clears.
5. A second entity or location. Consolidated reporting, intercompany transactions, and separate tax treatment all arrive at once. Our multi-entity management service handles the mechanics; the CFO work is deciding whether the second location earns its keep.
6. Somebody offered to buy it. Or you started thinking about the exit. Either way the numbers need to be defensible a year before that conversation, not the week of it.

If two or more of those are true right now, a strategy call is worth an hour of your time. If none of them are, you probably need clean books and good reporting first, and that's a cheaper problem to solve.

Yes. We're based in Cranberry Township, PA, and we work with business owners across the US. Everything runs remotely, on purpose. QuickBooks Online, video calls, and shared dashboards mean the strategy call happens whether you're in Sewickley or Seattle. There's no billable travel and no reason to schedule around a drive.

For Pittsburgh-area clients, being local still helps with the things that are genuinely local: Pennsylvania earned income tax and PSD codes, local services tax, Allegheny County filings, and knowing which lenders in this market move quickly. Owners outside Pennsylvania get the same service. Owners inside it get the PA-specific pieces handled too.

Call us at (412) 407-7420 to talk through whether the timing is right. The first conversation is free, and we'll tell you plainly if you're better off starting with bookkeeping.