A successful organization runs on four wheels: Operations, Sales, Marketing, and Finance. If any of the wheels has low pressure/poor performance, your entire organization might derail from the right track.
One of the major driving factors in any business is finance. Your operations, as well as, sales and marketing campaigns will run seamlessly only and only if your finance is in control and well managed.
When we talk about finance, a little turbulence in it can dramatically change your company’s direction. Often, businesses find these turbulences too late because they do not keep track of accounts, bookkeeping, audit, tax, and other aspects of business financial management. Majorly accounting in small businesses is often put on the last stage.
If your finance is not accurate, on track, and under control, you are likely to lose control of all other wheels of business, namely, marketing, sales, and operations. Many small businesses and startup companies fail to survive because of this important aspect, which is often ignored.
By keeping all these facts in mind, it is essential to have a strong finance team to achieve your business goals. There are multiple options to keep things on track in the finance department. One of the best options is to hire a part-time CFO or invest in outsourced CFO part time services. An experienced and skilled CFO can be a crucial factor that can serve as a lifeboat for your company.
Many businesses do not invest in hiring a chief financial officer because of a thought process that the company does not have enough work for him or her. However, the role of a part time CFO for small businesses is as crucial as it is for a huge enterprise.
If you are wondering whether using a temporary CFO service is good for your firm or not, let’s throw light on this topic for your convenience and better understanding. This article will share in detail how outsourcing CFO service for part time or full time can benefit small businesses and enterprises.
What Does a Part-time CFO Do?
The role of a remote CFO for business or CFO service outsourcing will be the same as you hire this professional on-premises. The company offering this service will handle all aspects that an experienced professional in this position would handle.
An interim CFO, aka Chief Financial Officer, is accountable for an organization’s financial, risk management, and administrative operations. That is not it. The job role of this finance professional is vast. Some of the major duties performed by a CFO in a business are listed below:
- Formulate operational and financial strategies
- Recognize relevant KPIs, and
- Monitor control systems
These major duties can help you to protect the company’s assets based on the accurate reports prepared by the chief financial officer.
What skills are required for the CFO
Whether you hire an in-house or remote CFO, he or she must possess the following skills:
- Leadership
- Management
- Expertise of GAAP
- Experience of budgeting
- Data analysis
- Negotiation
- Conflict management
- Report generation
- Effective calculation
Provisional CFO Responsibilities
As mentioned earlier, the role of a chief financial officer is enormous and it covers multiple jobs related to accounting and financial management. Following is the list of major activities handled by a CFO on a regular basis.
- Providing direction to the company based on input on the future plan, financial strategies, budgeting, and forecasting. For this, a CFO analyzes past performance, and current status, and even forecasts the future based on solid data. It needs thorough skills to understand and crunch data to reap reliable output.
- Performance metrics creation to support the company’s strategic direction. This gives validity to the idea and budget invested in certain business strategies. The CFO will also highlight the risks and the possible drop ratio to help businesses in decision-making.
- Develop a good relationship with the board and management members. He or she also cultivates a strong relationship with other team members to communicate ideas, finances, and even brutal facts swiftly.
- Overlook the operations of accounting, HR, legal, treasury, tax, and investor relation departments to keep everything on track.
- Managing third parties hired to perform accounting and finance functions. If you hire a firm to use outsourced part-time CFO professional services, then the CFO will manage the internal team. Even in that case, the CFO will keep harmony among all financial professionals working for you.
- Supervise the company’s transaction processing systems. He or she will focus on the accuracy of transactions. Moreover, it would be verified that if transactions are made as per the allotted budget or not. This will help in making accurate accountancy easier.
- Evaluate employee benefit plans while focusing on improving cost efficiency. The core goal here of a CFO would be to provide satisfactory perks to employees, so they can work passionately. However, this must be achieved without any loss to the company.
- Monitoring all active legal issues affecting the company in any way. Legal issues not only cause some expenses, but they may also cause major losses. Even brand damage due to a legal issue can lead to financial loss. Thus, the role of a CFO in a business also includes keeping a close look at legal matters.
- Report back to the board, risk management team, and audit committee to help them make vital decisions.
- Create an insurance policy to cover the major risks to be prepared for the worst cases.
- Monitoring and managing cash balances, investment funds, debt, and equity to keep growing funds with strategic investments.
Why Hire Part-time CFO Services for Betterment?
A CFO is a company’s financial engine; he or she overlooks all financial, budgeting, forecasting, and many other financial management jobs. Therefore, if you contact interim CFO firms to outsource financial services, you can help your business in the following manners:
Preserve your Monetary Resources
The process of finding a qualified CFO is expensive, complicated, and tedious. From posting a job requirement to putting in a lucrative offer package, interviewing a CFO, onboarding him or her, and providing a balanced work environment; there are various costs involved in hiring an in-house CFO.
Even if you don’t consider recruitment expenses, a full-time CFO’s average salary is $250,000 annually. It is too expensive for small and medium-sized companies. Even for an enterprise, handling this whole process is quite expensive, followed by constant expense on this resource. Along with the recruitment process, you would also need to hire a recruitment agency that can interview a CFO and gauge the skills and efficiency.
On the contrary, if you outsource CFO services, the first benefit is you will not need to invest in recruitment and human resource management. This indeed saves a lot of money for a small business. The operational efficiency of the remote CFO will be as much as your in-house professional, but literally at half price.
For instance, when you contact CapActix for a part-time CFO outsourcing service, you can skip the recruitment and hiring part. Furthermore, you don’t have to interview CFO candidates or offer them any incentives. Under a fixed package, you can hire highly qualified CFOs as per project requirements or for fixed hours from the team of CapActix without spending additional money.
Analytical Adviser
Your interim CFO can provide a strategic analysis of every financial aspect of your business. He is likely to have more experience and expertise than a local chief financial officer. The reason is remote CFOs usually work with numerous startups and large enterprises’ finances. This adds up to their experience and expertise. They will have versatile knowledge. This makes them capable to set strategic borders and accurate financial goals for your organization. CFO can utilize his or her multipurpose experience to provide an analytical overview of the weak financial aspect of your company.
This can help your business look at even peculiar finance-related points to make the right business moves. To consolidate the facts, an interim CFO will also provide detailed reports. These reports can serve as a baseline to discuss with other board members while making crucial decisions.
Start Instantly
Time is money, and when your money manager isn’t on the post, you are losing both money and time. We mean if you take a long route to advertise the post and interview a large number of potential candidates for the CFO job, you are exposing your company to multiple financial vulnerabilities. You are also keeping the position open for quite a long. The crucial job of a financial expert stays untouched. This can keep you from losing sight of your business’s finances. All this can lead to major losses.
Therefore, you need to hire a professional CFO immediately because the financial risks won’t wait for you to complete the recruitment process. On top of it, your permanent CFOs can’t instantly start delivering results, they have to first understand your company, and then they can predict something. They may also take time in joining if they are already employed somewhere. After joining, they may need to go through onboarding, knowledge transfer, and analysis. All this would waste a lot of precious time and keep your business at risk.
On contrary to that, interim CFO firms are always ready to serve. They have a qualified and experienced CFO team always available to serve you. They also provide scale-up and scale-down services. It means when the workload is high, you can use this service for more hours, and then you can reduce the number of hours.
Take CapActix for an example; you just need to connect with the team and share your CFO service requirements. Within a few days or hours, you will start receiving the best financial services. No delays!
Flexible Hiring Model
One of the major reasons small businesses do not invest in using a virtual part-time CFO service is the lack of work. They consider that there is not enough work to handle for someone in this position. Moreover, hiring an experienced chief financial officer for an SMB can be an expensive affair. This is true as well to a certain extent.
But, if you hire a company offering interim outsourced CFO services, you can gain the advantage of “pay what you get” or “pay for what you want”. You can define the role of a part-time CFO for small businesses and receive services as per that. It will also cost you less. You can anytime add or remove financial management responsibilities to gain maximum out of your investment.
Whether you want risk management services or cost analysis, you need to say it, and your part-time CFO will provide it. You can hire a remote CFO for a job role or multiple; they can provide all types of services. That means based on budget or a specific project; you can alter the CFO role.
Quick Crisis Management
Have you lost a major client?
Is your company’s budgetary limit exceeded?
Are you worried about how would you manage this financial crisis?
You need an experienced CFO. However, this may cause another stress as it would get expensive to hire a dedicated chief financial officer that works for your business. But, there is an even better solution to handle the crisis if you are using outsourced CFO services.
You can easily contact your interim CFO company to receive an immediate crisis management solution. The companies offering this type of service usually hold more experience in handling business crises. Thus, they can offer a variety of crisis control solutions like:
- Short-term cash flow reports
- Creating new financial forecasts
- Assistance in raising vital funds
- And so much more
All this information can help you tackle the crisis situation more professionally and get through it without major loss.
Effective Communication
Part-time CFOs are often skilled communicators and can effectively communicate financial information to stakeholders. They can explain complex financial concepts in simple terms and provide clear explanations of financial reports and metrics. This can help businesses communicate their financial performance to investors, lenders, and other stakeholders, and build trust and confidence in their financial management.
Financial Mentoring
You can’t handle everything on your own — you are good at running your business and CFOs are good at managing your finances. Even if you are a trained CFO and you understand business finance really well, time is the key contributor. The job of a chief financial officer includes so much that it consumes a lot of time. If you will get involved in this job, then who would run your business?
Therefore, when you hire part-time CFOs, you can be stress-free about wasting your time on finance. Your CFO outsourcing service provider company will establish reporting systems and provide assistance to your financial team. It will mentor your existing finance team and guide them to avoid risks and uncertainties. If you don’t have an in-house team, then also the company will keep accurate recordkeeping and provide you reports that can help you get an overview of business finance, make important decisions, etc.
Read also Top 10 Benefits of Outsourced CFO Service to Increase Profits
International Network
An interim CFO part time service provider company would be offering this service to several businesses of different sized worldwide. This type of company also takes membership in major CFO groups and participates in events, tradeshows, etc. In a nutshell, a company would have a large CFO network at the international level.
If you select offshore CFO services providing company, you can gain benefits from their international CFO network. You will not only get the advantage of their diversified experience, but you will also gain several other benefits. This type of company follows international standards and regulations. They know long term business financial management. This can work in your favor.
For instance, the CFO services of CapActix benefit worldwide businesses with outsourced chief financial officer services. Our company is familiar with international financial trends and technologies. With an interim CFO, you can get international-level services under your limited budget.
Access to Technology
Part-time CFOs are often equipped with the latest technology and tools to manage financial processes. This can include financial software systems, data analytics tools, and other advanced technologies that may not be affordable or accessible for smaller businesses. By leveraging these resources, part-time CFOs can help businesses streamline their financial processes and gain better insights into their financial performance.
Stay Ahead of Time
Outsourcing financial and accounting is the new trend that progressive companies are rapidly adopting to grow their business. The companies refuse to take the hassle of recruiting and managing an in-house financial management team. Moreover, companies don’t find it worth keeping an eye on a CFO working for a firm for accuracy and productivity. This increases the trend of hiring remote companies to provide offshore accounting and financial management services. Already thousands of businesses have joined this progressive mindset.
If you don’t step up with the change, you will be left behind. Your competitors will leverage the part-time CFO services and relevant trends. On the other hand, you would be left thinking and evaluating this profitable option. So, if you want to stay ahead of time, you need to adopt new technologies and hiring modules right now.
Here you can read Complete Comparison Between In-house and Virtual CFO Services
Wrap-up
You cannot ignore the importance of a chief financial officer in a business, regardless of your business size. A CFO handles several crucial business aspects that provide the much needed fuel to skyrocket your business. It is necessary to understand its worth of it and get a reliable CFO onboard.
The limitation here as well is recruiting and managing a CFO with integrity. It is an expensive affair and not all businesses can afford it. In fact, even if a business can afford to hire an in-house chief financial officer, businesses are moving towards the trend of outsourcing accounting jobs, including CFO services.
Thus, using virtual part-time CFO outsourcing can be a trendsetter for your own business. You can get started immediately and receive results instantly. Even the process of outsourcing this job with predefined responsibilities is overly simplified by the top financial management companies.
One Tap and Hire Part-Time CFO
The CFO is the person that can help you with business continuity. They will monitor-control-report in real-time, so you can grow your business beyond the limits. To hire an experienced interim CFO, you just need to fill out this simple form and share your requirements with us. With just one click, you will hire a qualified CFO and start gaining a plethora of benefits. So what are you waiting for, get in touch with us NOW!
We, CapActix, are a leading certified and expert accounting company that offers part CFO services for CPA firms. If you have any queries, visit our website and Contact us at +1 201-778-0509 or reach out at biz@capactix.com.