At some point a board question arrives that your reporting cannot answer. Not a hard question, usually. Something like what happens to runway if we pull forward six engineering hires, or which customer segment is actually profitable. You have the data somewhere, and no one whose job it is to turn it into an answer.
That gap is what a fractional CFO fills. They give you senior finance leadership part-time: financial modeling, board reporting, cash and runway management, and fundraising support, without a full-time hire. This page covers what the engagement includes, what it costs against published rate cards rather than marketing ranges, and when it is the right call.
What a fractional CFO service includes
There is no neutral definition of the scope. The AICPA has not published one, and each firm packages it differently. Across the published service descriptions of the major startup-focused providers, the same eight areas recur:
- Cash and liquidity. A 13-week cash forecast, burn tracking, and runway scenarios. Usually the first deliverable in any engagement.
- Budgeting and forecasting. A rolling 12 to 24 month model with scenario planning attached.
- KPI dashboards and board reporting. Including agreeing what each metric means before it appears in a deck.
- Fundraising and diligence prep. The investor model, data room readiness, and the diligence question list.
- Systems and process: the finance stack, the chart of accounts, and the close calendar.
- Profitability work, meaning unit economics and cohort analysis rather than a blended margin.
- Controls and tax strategy, coordinated with whoever prepares the returns.
- Transaction readiness, from valuations through to an eventual exit process.
Engagements are usually sold by cadence rather than by hours, which is worth knowing before you compare quotes. A typical structure is a weekly cash check-in, a monthly KPI and reporting review, and quarterly planning, with the first thirty days spent building a baseline and a ninety-day roadmap.
Fractional, outsourced, or virtual CFO: the same role, three labels
These terms are used interchangeably and the distinctions people draw between them are mostly marketing. Fractional is the most common label today. Outsourced usually implies the work sits with a firm rather than an individual, which matters for continuity when someone is on holiday. Virtual describes the delivery model rather than the scope, and in practice almost every engagement is remote.
The differences that actually affect you are whether you get a named individual or a rotating pool, whether the same team also owns your bookkeeping, and how fast you get an answer when something urgent comes up. Ask those three rather than which noun a firm uses.
What it costs, on published rate cards
Here is the part most cost articles get wrong, including the ones published by the firms themselves. Vendors' explainer content quotes retainer ranges four to five times higher than the rate cards those same vendors publish. One well-known provider's cost guide cites $3,000 to $12,000 a month while its own published entry tier for CFO services is $1,750.
Read the rate cards instead. Published monthly retainers from named startup providers cluster considerably lower than the ranges usually quoted:
| Provider | Published monthly tiers | Published hourly |
|---|---|---|
| Burkland | $1,600 / $2,500 / $4,200 | $190–$500 |
| Pilot | $1,750 / $3,150 / $5,250 | $450 CFO, $295 controller |
| Zeni | $1,599 / $2,990 / $4,990+ | Setup fee applies |
| Kruze | Quoted per engagement | $325 CFO, $250 modeling |
Marketplace data sits lower again: one fractional-executive marketplace publishes an average CFO rate of $179 an hour across a rolling sample, well below the $450 on a large provider's rate card. The spread reflects who you are hiring, an independent operator or a firm with a bench behind them, more than it reflects seniority. For a fuller treatment of why published figures disagree, see how much a fractional CFO costs.
The comparison that decides it
The relevant number is not the retainer, it is the retainer against a full-time hire. The F Suite's 2026 compensation report, sampling 346 CFOs, puts base salary at $300,000, total cash at $376,875, and total compensation including equity at $447,600, with median equity value of $1.5 million. Federal data is lower and broader: the Bureau of Labor Statistics classifies CFOs under Chief Executives, with a May 2025 median of $213,990 and a 90th percentile of $507,730.
Against either figure, a $2,500 monthly retainer is roughly $30,000 a year. That is the arithmetic that makes fractional the default first move rather than a compromise. A useful switching rule circulating among investors: when you are spending about three quarters of a full-time salary on fractional support, hire the full-time person.
Most articles quote the Bureau of Labor Statistics median for Financial Managers, $166,570, as a CFO salary. That is the controller tier. CFOs are classified under Chief Executives, median $213,990. Mixing the two understates a full-time CFO by about $47,000 before equity.
What has to be true before a CFO is useful
A fractional CFO builds on your ledger. If the books close three weeks late, or the revenue recognition is inconsistent, the first two months of the engagement go on cleanup rather than strategy, at CFO rates. This is the most common way the money gets wasted.
Get the bookkeeping current and accrual-based first, or engage a provider where both sit with the same team. The model is only as good as the ledger under it, and no amount of senior finance experience fixes inputs that arrive late.
Where Zinance fits
Zinance runs the whole finance function rather than a slice of it. Your books close daily, so the CFO work starts from numbers that are already current, and bookkeeping, tax, R&D credits, and CFO support sit with one team you can reach on Slack in about ten minutes. That removes the handoff that usually sits between your bookkeeper and your CFO, which is where most of the delay and most of the finger-pointing lives. For the timing question, see when to hire a fractional CFO.