"Strategic finance leadership" is what every fractional CFO sells and what no founder can inspect. So let me describe the job the way I would describe it to a client: by what actually lands in your inbox, and when. This is the real deliverable calendar from the engagements I run, month by month. If a firm you are evaluating cannot produce a list like this, that tells you something.
Month one: diagnosis, not dashboards
The first month is spent understanding what exists, because everything downstream depends on it. The deliverables are unglamorous and essential:
An entity and obligation map. Every entity in the group, every jurisdiction it touches, every filing it owes, and every deadline on one page. For a single Canadian corporation this takes an afternoon. For a group with a Delaware holdco, a UAE entity, and an operating company somewhere else, this document is frequently the first time anyone has seen the whole structure at once, and it almost always surfaces a filing someone forgot.
A books assessment. How far behind is the bookkeeping, how reliable are the balances, and what needs cleanup before the numbers can be trusted. If there is a catch-up project, it gets scoped and priced here, separately, so the recurring engagement starts from clean data.
A close calendar. The commitment that the books close on a fixed day each month, with named owners for each step: bank reconciliations, payroll postings, revenue recognition, intercompany invoices, accruals. The calendar is the difference between reporting that happens and reporting that is promised.
The monthly rhythm: what arrives every month, forever
Once the foundation is set, usually by month two or three, the engagement settles into a monthly package. Mine looks like this, and most good ones look similar:
The management accounts. Balance sheet and income statement, closed on schedule, with variance commentary written in plain language: what moved against budget and prior month, why, and whether it matters. The commentary is the product; statements without it are just a data export. I have written elsewhere about what belongs in a management accounts package, and the answer for most startups also includes two analyses founders consistently underrate: a software and subscriptions review, because SaaS spend creeps a few hundred dollars at a time until it is a real number, and a payroll analysis, because compensation is usually 60 to 80 percent of burn and deserves more than one line.
A cash and runway view. A rolling forecast, commonly a 13-week cash flow for companies watching runway closely, updated with actuals each month. The deliverable is a number the whole leadership team agrees on: how many months of cash, under which assumptions. When that number stops being a matter of opinion, cash decisions get noticeably faster.
The KPI set your board actually reads. A handful of metrics, defined once, measured the same way every month. For SaaS that is usually ARR movement, net revenue retention, gross margin, burn multiple, and runway. The discipline is refusing to let the list grow: five numbers tracked consistently beat thirty tracked sporadically.
Standing availability. Between reporting cycles, the CFO is the person you forward the term sheet to, the one who sanity-checks the enterprise deal's payment terms, and the one who answers the pricing question with a margin model instead of a hunch. This does not produce an artifact, but it is a large share of the value, and it is why retainers beat hourly billing: you should never hesitate to forward the email.
The quarterly layer
The board and investor package. Financial statements, KPI trends, budget versus actual, runway scenarios, and commentary, assembled into something a director can read in twenty minutes. A good package answers the three questions every board asks (how is revenue, how is burn, how long is the runway) before anyone has to ask them, which changes the meeting from interrogation to discussion.
A reforecast. The annual budget meets reality every quarter. Assumptions that broke get replaced, and the runway number updates accordingly. Companies that skip this end up defending a January budget in October, which convinces nobody.
A compliance checkpoint. The obligation map from month one gets reviewed: what was filed, what is due next quarter, what changed in the structure that creates a new obligation. Quiet quarters here are the point.
The annual cycle
Once a year the engagement carries three heavier lifts: the annual budget, built bottom-up with department owners rather than grown 20 percent from last year; year-end and audit or review support, where the auditors' request list gets answered from organized records instead of archaeology; and tax season coordination, where the CFO makes sure the corporate returns, the transfer pricing documentation, and the information returns tie back to the books that were closed all year. When the monthly rhythm has been running properly, year-end is administrative. When it has not, year-end is expensive.
Project work: the raise, the transaction, the restructuring
On top of the rhythm, engagements periodically carry defined projects: building the model and data room for a priced round, diligence support on an acquisition, or restructuring an entity group before a new market entry. These are scoped and priced separately from the retainer, and they should be; a fundraise consumes 30 to 60 hours of senior time in a quarter. What the retainer buys is that the person running the project already knows your numbers cold on day one.
What a fractional CFO does not do
Clarity on boundaries prevents disappointed clients. A fractional CFO is not your bookkeeper, though the firm may provide monthly accounting under the same roof, and the two work best when connected. Not your tax preparer, though they coordinate the preparers and own the calendar. Not a full-time executive in your Slack at 11pm, and if your company genuinely needs that, you have outgrown the model; our guide on fractional versus full-time CFOs covers when that point arrives.
How to use this list
Take this article into any evaluation call and ask the firm to mark up what is included, what costs extra, and what they do not do. You will learn more in ten minutes than from any pitch deck. And if you want to see our version directly, the scope and starting prices are on the fractional CFO advisory page, or book a consult and I will walk you through a real (anonymized) monthly package.