Fractional CFO FAQs

All of our Fractional CFOs have held full-time CFO roles (or comparable) and have many years of experience working for nonprofits. Many have CPA licenses or have similar qualifications.
We do our best to match your organization with a FCFO who brings relevant technical expertise to your organization’s challenges and opportunities.

You can and, in fact, we strongly encourage it!
This helps to ensure the success of the engagement and, should anything ever need special attention, we can identify it early.
We also encourage regular check-ins with our founder to confirm that everything meets your expectations and needs.

We require a security deposit, usually equal to about 2/3 of a month’s billings. When the engagement ends, we either return the deposit or we can apply it to your last month’s bill.
We typically bill on the first or second of the month for the previous month’s work. You will have 10 calendar days to pay.
We accept paper checks, ACH (made easy through our electronic invoices), and also work with Bill.com.

We require a monthly commitment of hours to provide you with dedicated Fractional CFO services. This reserved time ensures that your Fractional CFO can focus exclusively on your organization's needs. Please note that if you choose a conservative number of monthly hours, your Fractional CFO’s ability to add extra “seasonal” hours may be limited during peak times.

We understand that sometimes you might get incredibly busy and unable to provide immediate feedback or instructions. To address this, please make sure your consultant always has backup tasks ready to go. That way, during periods when you can't follow up on their communications, they can continue to add value to your organization.
For instance, you might have activities like this in your backlog to keep your FCFO busy when you don’t have other things for them to do:
• Review your policy and procedure manual, suggesting improvements and updates.
• Create new financial (and non-financial) dashboards to help your board and management more effectively engage with key measures of your organization’s success.
• Identify software that could improve your financial department’s effectiveness and save money.
• Develop policies for your board’s consideration such as a gift acceptance policy or an investment policy.
• Review your bylaws and articles of incorporation for opportunities for improvement.
• And much more, tailored to your unique needs.
Please create, and prioritize, a big backlog of tasks. We can provide input to help you create it, but ultimately a high-value backlog depends on you, the client.

We make every effort to provide full value for the time you’ve paid for and to communicate with you when we run out of work to do.
But we can’t carry unused time forward.
Why? Because we’ve already committed next month’s time as well.
The one exception: if the FCFO cannot work due to personal injury, health, or other disruptions to their ability to perform quality, timely work. In those circumstances, we will work with you to find a reasonable resolution such as a substitute FCFO, refund, or something like that.

We completely understand that some clients have seasonal or unexpected needs for additional support. We will work with you to find a solution. That could look like your FCFO working additional hours on a temporary basis or bringing in another member of the Nonprofit CFOs team to assist.
Any overage would be billed at the end of the month, rather than reducing the following month's hours. This approach simplifies billing, ensures transparency, and allows us to maintain our commitments.