FRACTIONAL CONTROLLER
Margin by client, by service line and by month, a rolling forecast you can plan against, and someone whose actual job is noticing things before you do.
Book a callA good bookkeeper gives you an accurate record of the past. That's the job and it matters. What it doesn't give you is an opinion. Nobody looks at the finished statements and says the thing you actually needed to hear, which is usually that one client is quietly unprofitable, or that the gap between your revenue and your bank balance has a name.
Most owners in the $1M to $15M range are running on a mix of instinct and their bank balance. That works right up until it doesn't, and it usually stops working around the same time the business gets complicated enough to be interesting.
On a million dollars of revenue.
That's not a scare number, it's just arithmetic. Being five percent wrong about your pricing, your margins or your costs is easy to do and almost impossible to notice from a bank balance. At a million in revenue it's fifty thousand dollars. At five million it's a quarter of a million.
Nobody misses it, because nobody sees it. That's what someone reading the numbers is for.
Closes the month properly.
Not just reconciled. Reviewed, adjusted, and signed off, so the statements are something you can make a decision on.
Tells you which work makes money.
Profitability by client, by service line, by location. Most owners have a strong opinion about this and it is wrong more often than not.
Runs a rolling forecast.
Twelve months out, updated monthly. So the question "can we afford this" has an answer that isn't a feeling.
Watches cash separately from profit.
Profitable businesses run out of cash all the time. The two numbers move differently and someone should be tracking both.
Brings you the thing you didn't ask about.
A cost that crept, a client whose margin slipped, a subscription nobody cancelled. This is the part that pays for itself.
Twenty minutes, and no pricing pressure on the call.
Book a callThe pattern repeats. Three things turn up almost every time.
One client isn't worth what you think.
Usually a large one, usually the one that takes the most hands-on time. Revenue and profit are different things and big clients hide the gap well.
A service line is subsidising another one.
The work you're proud of is often not the work paying the bills. Once you can see it you can price it, or stop doing it.
Your best month wasn't your best month.
High revenue with high delivery cost can be worse than a quiet month with clean margin. It's very hard to tell without someone measuring.
I truly appreciate his ability to present his extensive financial knowledge into a language that I can understand personally and relate to. We have talked at great lengths about my short term, as well as long term goals for my future.
Adrian M.
Chiropractor – Owner/Founder of All Access
A controller only works if there's something worth reading. If any of these describe you, the honest answer is that this isn't your bottleneck yet, and we'll tell you so on the call rather than sell it to you.
Your books aren't current.
Analysis on stale books produces confident nonsense. Get current first.
You're a single service line with one pricing model.
There isn't enough variation for margin analysis to tell you much you don't already know.
The real question is a tax or structure question.
That's a different conversation and probably a different service.
A named team.
You get the names of the people doing your work in week one. Not a support queue, not a ticket number.
A direct channel.
Dedicated Slack or WhatsApp. Questions get answered the same day, not the following month.
A full-time North American team.
No contractors, no offshore handoffs, no one learning your business from a spreadsheet overnight.
Plain English.
If we use a word you would have to look up, that's our mistake. Say so and we'll explain it properly.
You'll have a number in writing before anyone starts.
Book a callIn the first thirty days we work out where the money is really going wrong. Sometimes it's further down, sometimes further up.
Book a call.
Twenty minutes. We ask what you can see today and what you wish you could see.
We scope it.
Priced to complexity, entities and how much reporting you actually need. You get the number in writing before anyone starts.
We start with a look at the last twelve months.
That's usually where the pattern is.
Twenty minutes, and you'll leave knowing whether a controller is what you need or whether something further down the stack is the real problem. No pricing pressure on the call.
Book a call