Could your business use an outsourced CFO?

When clients think of outsourced accounting services, oftentimes they think about bookkeeping. This isn’t incorrect. Chortek’s outsourced accounting services include day-to-day tasks such as general ledger management, monthly closing, financial reporting, and more. However, what you may not know is that our services extend beyond the everyday. The second layer of outsourced accounting includes serving as an outsourced CFO for your business and doing higher-level pieces of work as a result.

What can an outsourced CFO provide for your business?

Sometimes you just need a sounding board. While business owners are the ones who know their business better than anyone, an outsourced CFO can help with the financial and strategic intricacies involved in owning a business, offering valuable perspective. You could expect an outsourced CFO to provide the following, for example:

Handling situations with your bank
Coordinating or contributing to strategic planning
Operational improvements
Helping with financial issues
Offering an objective perspective

Plus, an outsourced CFO can be a referral resource for your business. If we don’t know how to do something, chances are we can make connections and know someone else who can help. Adding an outside member to your team can mean opening the door to a whole network of new contacts.

The business benefit to working with an outsourced CFO

Depending on the size of your business, you may not need a full-time CFO. If you don’t have to have someone on staff full-time, outsourcing the service is an effective option where you only pay for the time you use. It can also be hard when you have a trusted resource in-house who leaves. Growing that relationship again can be hard. With outsourced CFO services, you don’t have a relationship with just one person. You are likely to have several people on your team who are privy to your strategic goals and needs. Even if staffing changes at the firm, you won’t have to start your relationship from scratch.

Working with a firm like Chortek also means working with a team that has a lot of experience with banks. When we work with a client and the bank as the outsourced CFO, we lend a lot of credibility to the relationship. Your business directly benefits from relationships that we already have in place.

Finally, if you are struggling with interpreting or understanding financial information, our financial experts can help you understand your numbers or work on KPIs that will be meaningful to your business. If you’re not sure what “good” means for your business, or which metrics have the greatest impact on your business growth, that is extra perspective and a framework we can provide.

How can you start working with an outsourced CFO?

We’ve seen a lot of success stories coming out of our outsourced accounting services. Our management team has been able to help clients through difficult financial situations, serving as a go-between with lenders to develop a plan for improvements, all while monitoring along the way. If you just need that extra push in the right direction, we can also help keep your momentum going.

If you think you could use help in large or small ways via outsourced accounting, we ask that clients start by providing good, reliable financial information so that we can make good decisions for the business. We may start by getting that information in order if it isn’t already. Next, we move to strategic planning meetings. What are your goals, pain points, issues, and where should we focus time and energy for improvements? From there we may renegotiate bank financing, consult on a potential acquisition, or even provide perspective on an HR issue. Whatever your hot buttons are, you can expect your outsourced CFO to help. To start, we uncover the areas of growth by having conversations with our clients.

If this sounds interesting to you, contact us and we can get the conversation started!