What is a CFO?

What does a CFO actually do?

The day-to-day work is mostly forecasting, monitoring and judgement. A CFO builds a cashflow forecast and keeps it current, so you know how many weeks of cash you are holding. They set budgets and check actual spending against them every month. They watch gross margin by product, service or customer, and say when it slips. They flag risks early: a customer paying later than they used to, a cost quietly growing, a month where payroll and VAT land in the same week. And when you are deciding whether to hire, raise prices, take on premises or accept a large order, they tell you what the numbers say about it beforehand rather than afterwards.

A CFO does not do your bookkeeping, chase your invoices or file your VAT return. That is a common confusion and it matters, because a business can have an excellent accountant and still have nobody doing this job.

CFO, accountant, bookkeeper: what is the difference?

The three roles sit on a timeline. A bookkeeper works in the past: recording transactions, reconciling the bank, keeping the ledger accurate. An accountant works on the recent past: preparing the year end, filing your accounts and your tax, making sure what you report is correct and compliant. A CFO works on the future: taking the same numbers and using them to decide what happens next.

They are complementary, not competing. Most small businesses have the first two covered and the third missing entirely, which is why the surprise usually arrives as a cashflow problem nobody saw coming rather than as a bookkeeping error.

What does a CFO cost?

A full-time CFO in the UK costs £150,000+ a year, before employer costs. A fractional or part-time FD costs £1,000 to £2,000 a month, depending on days. Asking your accountant to produce monthly management accounts costs £200 to £500 a month, though that gets you the report rather than the ongoing judgement. For a business turning over a few hundred thousand to a few million, none of those is obviously affordable, which is why the role tends to go unfilled until the business is large enough that going without it becomes dangerous.

Do you need one at your size?

You do not necessarily need to hire a person. You do need the job done. The signs that it is not being done are consistent: your cash position surprises you, you do not know your margin by customer or product, you find out about problems after they have cost you money, and you make decisions on gut feel because the numbers take too long to assemble. If that is familiar, the question is not whether you can afford a CFO. It is which parts of the role you can get without hiring one.

How CFO Pal compares

CFO Pal automates the monitoring and reporting half of the role from your Xero, QuickBooks or Sage data. It writes you a plain-English summary every Monday morning, projects your cash position sixteen weeks out, tracks budgets against actuals, and alerts you the same day cash drops below your threshold, an invoice goes overdue or spending spikes. Every figure it quotes is computed from your own ledger before the AI sees it, so the writing is generated and the arithmetic is not.

It does not replace human strategic advice, and it does not give tax advice. What it does is close the gap between your accounting software answering when you ask and nobody telling you when you should have asked. From £199/month + VAT.