What is a Virtual Chief Financial Officer (CFO)?

A CFO is the Chief Financial Officer. They operate within your business and they provide a high level of strategic advice, and they also oversee a number of parts of your business.

A Virtual Chief Financial Officer is all about bringing the CFO experience into everyday businesses like yours.

The benefit of having a Virtual Chief Financial Officer is it lets you have the strategic advice, lets you have financial advice in the areas of cash flow, profitability and also the other departments within your business.  They can oversee and help provide that advice to you.

As a business owner a lot of people try and be everything to everyone and try and cover all aspects of their business. The idea of a Virtual CFO is you don’t need to know everything or be across every aspect of your business.  We can come in there.  

We’ve got a team of people, both in our accounting team but also external advisors we use, to provide the full service package to cover absolutely everything your business needs. From high level strategic advice to bookkeeping, to finance to HR and to legal advice.  We act as basically the hub to co-ordinate all that for you and to provide you with that full package so you can get on with running your business.

As part of the VCFO service we are offering

We are going to get into your business, establish what your key performance indicators are, what the key metrics are that drive your business and we are going to then set up a reporting system for you so you can actually look in there, check in there on a regular monthly basis and see how it’s going.  So that gives you peace of mind that you are on track.

Some of the signs of when you may need a VCFO:

1.  Obviously you’ve grown your business. You may of started it from scratch, or you may have purchased the business, but you’ve grown the business to a stage where you are not able to cover off on all the functions and maybe it doesn’t make sense for you to. 

2. Your skills might be better put to use in what you know within the business.  So some of the signs that you need a Virtual CFO might be, as I say,

3. everything is getting on top of you trying to run the different functions of the business or alternatively the business has grown so quickly you are having cash flow issues,

4. maybe there’s profitability issues or it could just be that your finance function is struggling within the business. 

5. Finally, maybe strategically you don’t know where you’re going and that’s where we can jump in and really give you some direction and put you back on the right track and give you some peace of mind so you can sleep well at night.

What we’ve tried to do is offer a number of packages just to try and give you an option. 

For some people they’ll just want the lower level basic package to start off with, just to try and restore some order within their business.  For they may be quite well advanced within their business and they want to take it to the next level, so therefore we’ve got a number of packages starting right at the ground level and right up to quite high level of strategic packages that you would pursue if you were really trying to take your business to the next level and you really wanted to have that push and that assistance to get there.

Depending on what level of package you’re on with the VCFO service, the structure of it will be as follows. 

There will be check in phone calls. Sometimes it will be weekly and sometimes it will be fortnightly depending on the package. There will also be monthly or quarterly meetings, and in the early days, maybe weekly. What comes out of this though is accountability.  Accountability is set for what you’ve got to achieve as a business owner and what we’re going to help you with. It is also setting your goals so that at the end of the day you’ve got a clear process going forward and we keep you on that path to where you’re trying to head.