You’re considering a fractional CFO but have no idea whether you need 5 hours a month or 25 hours a week—and the pricing models you’ve seen range so wildly that it’s impossible to know what’s reasonable. Most fractional CFO providers won’t give you straight answers about time commitments because the honest answer is “it depends,” which doesn’t help you budget or set expectations.
The reality is that fractional CFO hours vary dramatically based on your revenue, growth rate, business model, and current financial infrastructure, but clear patterns emerge when you look at real engagements across different company types. This article breaks down typical hour commitments by company size, shows you real schedule examples from SaaS companies to law firms, and gives you the specific factors that determine whether you need 10 hours monthly or 30 hours weekly.
Typical Fractional CFO Hours Per Week and Month
A fractional CFO typically works anywhere from 10 to 30 hours per week for a single client, though the actual number shifts dramatically based on your company’s revenue, complexity, and current priorities. The “fractional” part means you’re hiring a seasoned CFO for a slice of their time—not the full 40-hour workweek—and paying only for the hours that actually move your business forward.
Think of it this way: most growing companies don’t need someone sitting in an office 40 hours a week to review cash flow or build financial models. What they really need is someone strategic enough to spot what’s holding back growth, then guide the CEO on exactly how to fix it. That’s where the fractional model shines—you get executive-level financial leadership without the full-time price tag. If you are unsure exactly what services fit into these hours, you can read our comprehensive guide to fractional CFOs.
Startup Under $2 M Revenue
Early-stage companies typically engage a fractional CFO for just 5 to 10 hours per month. At this stage, the work focuses almost entirely on building basic financial infrastructure—setting up clean books, establishing a chart of accounts, and creating simple cash flow forecasts that help you avoid running out of money.
The fractional CFO’s role here is less about complex strategy and more about making sure you have accurate numbers and a repeatable monthly close process. You might meet once or twice a month to review how things are going, talk through hiring decisions, or model out different pricing scenarios before committing to a new service line.
Scaling Firm $2 M–$10 M
Once your revenue crosses $2 million and you’re actively scaling, expect to work with a fractional CFO for 15 to 25 hours per week. The role shifts from foundational setup to active growth navigation—building detailed forecasts, tracking metrics that actually predict future performance, and translating financial data into decisions about hiring, marketing spend, and operational investments.
At Bennett Financials, this is where we act as the navigator. The CEO says “we want to hit $10 million,” and we map out exactly what that requires in terms of cash, people, and margin targets. We’re also watching for problems—declining conversion rates, thinning gross margins, or cash crunches—and reporting back monthly on whether you’re on track or drifting off course.
Pre-Exit or M&A Prep
Companies preparing for acquisition, fundraising, or a sale often need 30+ hours per week from their fractional CFO, sometimes approaching full-time for 90 to 180 days. This phase demands intensive work: cleaning up historical financials, building investor-ready projections, preparing due diligence materials, and positioning the business for maximum valuation.
If you’re six months from a liquidity event, your fractional CFO becomes the quarterback coordinating with your attorney, investment banker, and tax advisor. Buyers and investors will scrutinize every number, and a well-prepared financial story can add hundreds of thousands or even millions to your exit price.
Real-World Schedule Examples by Company Size
Let’s break down what fractional CFO hours actually look like in practice, using real scenarios from the types of businesses we work with at Bennett Financials.
SaaS at $5 M ARR
A SaaS company at $5 million in annual recurring revenue typically engages a fractional CFO for 20 hours per week. Here’s how the time breaks down:
- Weekly KPI review (2 hours): Analyzing monthly recurring revenue growth, churn rate, customer acquisition cost, and lifetime value to catch trends before they become problems
- Monthly financial close and reporting (4 hours): Ensuring accurate revenue recognition, reconciling deferred revenue, and producing board-ready financials
- Quarterly forecasting (6 hours): Modeling different growth scenarios, stress-testing cash runway, and updating the 18-month financial plan
- Strategic meetings with CEO (4 hours): Discussing pricing changes, evaluating new market opportunities, or deciding whether to raise capital
- Ad hoc projects (4 hours): Responding to investor questions, analyzing unit economics for a new product line, or building financial models for potential acquisitions
Every hour focuses on decisions that directly impact growth, profitability, or enterprise value—not just producing reports.
Law Firm on Contingency Cycles
A personal injury or litigation firm with $3 million in revenue needs about 15 hours per week from a fractional CFO, with time concentrated around cash flow management and partner distributions. The typical allocation looks like this:
- Bi-weekly cash flow forecasting (3 hours): Projecting when case settlements will hit and ensuring sufficient operating cash between big wins
- Monthly profitability analysis by case type (4 hours): Tracking which practice areas generate the best margins and where overhead is eroding profit
- Quarterly partner distribution planning (3 hours): Structuring tax-efficient distributions that balance partner income with firm reinvestment
- Trust accounting oversight (2 hours): Reviewing IOLTA compliance and ensuring client funds are properly segregated
- Strategic planning sessions (3 hours): Evaluating whether to hire another associate, open a new office, or invest in case management technology
Law firms have unique complexity around contingency revenue recognition and trust accounting, so expertise in legal practice economics becomes critical.
Creative Agency With Retainers
A marketing or creative agency at $4 million in revenue typically needs 18 hours per week from a fractional CFO, with heavy emphasis on project profitability and resource allocation:
- Weekly capacity and utilization review (2 hours): Tracking billable hours, identifying underutilized team members, and spotting projects burning too much time
- Monthly client profitability analysis (5 hours): Calculating true profit by client after accounting for all labor, contractor costs, and overhead allocation
- Bi-weekly cash flow and AR management (3 hours): Monitoring collections, identifying slow-paying clients, and forecasting cash for upcoming payroll
- Quarterly pricing and service mix strategy (4 hours): Analyzing which services generate the best margins and whether retainer pricing reflects actual delivery costs
- Monthly leadership meetings (4 hours): Discussing new business pipeline, evaluating whether to hire full-time versus contractors, or deciding if a client relationship is worth keeping
Agencies often struggle with scope creep and hidden costs in client delivery, so the ability to expose true project profitability becomes a game-changer for margin improvement.
How Those Hours Break Down Into Strategic and Operational Work
Not all fractional CFO hours are created equal. Some focus on high-level strategy that shapes your business direction, while others involve more tactical financial management that keeps operations running smoothly.
Strategic work typically consumes 40 to 50 percent of a fractional CFO’s time and includes building the financial roadmap that translates your growth goals into concrete numbers. This means creating detailed forecasts that show exactly what revenue, margin, and cash flow look like at each stage of growth, then stress-testing the models against different scenarios—what if sales take six months longer to ramp, or you lose your second-biggest client?
At Bennett Financials, this is where we build out the path from $5 million to $10 million. We map the required investments in people, technology, and marketing, calculate the cash needed to fund growth, and identify the specific constraints that could derail the plan. This isn’t just spreadsheet work—it’s translating financial data into a clear growth strategy the CEO can actually execute.
Proactive tax planning typically represents 15 to 20 percent of fractional CFO hours and focuses on structuring your business to keep more cash in your pocket for reinvestment. This goes far beyond basic tax prep—we’re talking about entity selection, timing of income and expenses, strategic use of retirement plans, and identifying opportunities for cost segregation or R&D credits. The goal is to reduce your tax bill by 40 to 60 percent compared to what you’d pay with reactive compliance-only accounting, then redeploy that saved cash into growth initiatives.
Regular financial monitoring consumes about 25 to 30 percent of fractional CFO time and involves tracking the metrics that actually predict future performance. This means building dashboards that show real-time cash position, gross margin trends, customer acquisition costs, and other leading indicators—then reviewing them weekly or monthly to catch problems before they become crises. The fractional CFO acts as an early warning system: noticing when booked sales calls are declining three months before revenue drops, or spotting margin erosion in a specific service line before it tanks overall profitability.
Communication and collaboration typically account for 10 to 15 percent of fractional CFO hours and include board presentations, investor updates, and training internal teams on financial concepts. For companies raising capital or preparing for exit, this communication work becomes even more critical—investors want to see a CFO who can articulate the financial story, defend assumptions in the forecast, and demonstrate command of the business model.
Five Factors That Change the Time Requirement
The hours your fractional CFO works aren’t static. They shift based on your business characteristics, current priorities, and the financial infrastructure you already have in place.
- Growth Velocity: Companies scaling at 50 percent or more year-over-year typically need double the fractional CFO hours compared to businesses growing at 10 to 15 percent annually. Rapid growth creates cash flow strain, requires constant hiring decisions, and demands frequent forecast updates as the business model evolves—all of which need CFO-level attention to avoid running out of cash or making expensive mistakes.
- Business Model Complexity: Your business model fundamentally shapes CFO time requirements. SaaS companies with subscription revenue need ongoing attention to cohort analysis, churn metrics, and deferred revenue accounting. Law firms on contingency cycles need cash flow forecasting around unpredictable settlements. Agencies with project-based work need detailed profitability tracking by client and service line. Each model has unique financial complexity that determines how many hours you’ll need.
- Capital Events: If you’re actively raising capital or preparing for acquisition, expect fractional CFO hours to spike by 50 to 100 percent during the 90 to 180 days leading up to the transaction. Due diligence, investor presentations, and financial model refinement are all time-intensive, and cutting corners here can cost you millions in valuation or deal terms.
- Accounting Team Strength: The quality of your existing bookkeeping and accounting team directly impacts fractional CFO hours. If you have a solid bookkeeper producing accurate monthly financials, your fractional CFO can focus entirely on strategy and analysis. If your books are a mess and your controller is overwhelmed, your fractional CFO will spend extra hours cleaning up data and building basic processes before delivering strategic value.
- Tech Stack Maturity: Companies with modern accounting systems like QuickBooks Online or Xero, integrated billing platforms, and automated reporting tools require 20 to 30 percent fewer fractional CFO hours than businesses running on spreadsheets and manual processes. Better technology means your CFO spends time analyzing and strategizing instead of hunting for data and reconciling errors.
Project-Based vs Ongoing Retainer Hours
Fractional CFO services come in two primary flavors: one-time projects with defined scope and timeline, or ongoing retainer relationships that provide continuous strategic support.
| Engagement Type | Typical Duration | Total Hours | Best For |
| One-Time System Buildout | 4-8 weeks | 40-80 hours | Companies needing financial infrastructure from scratch |
| 90-Day Cash Crunch Fix | 3 months | 80-120 hours | Businesses facing immediate cash flow crisis |
| Monthly Navigator Retainer | Ongoing | 40-100 hours/month | Growing companies needing continuous strategic guidance |
| Pre-Exit Preparation | 3-6 months | 200-400 hours | Companies preparing for sale or acquisition |
A system buildout project typically spans 6 to 8 weeks and consumes 60 to 80 total hours, focused on establishing clean books, building financial dashboards, and creating forecasting templates. The deliverable is a complete financial infrastructure: clean historical books, a chart of accounts designed for your business model, KPI dashboards that update automatically, and forecast templates you can maintain internally.
An intensive cash rescue engagement runs 90 days and requires 80 to 120 hours, with hours front-loaded in the first month to quickly stabilize cash flow. The fractional CFO will build a 13-week cash flow forecast, identify immediate cost cuts or revenue acceleration opportunities, negotiate with vendors for extended terms, and create a weekly monitoring system to ensure you stay solvent.
An ongoing retainer relationship is the most common fractional CFO model, typically starting at 40 hours per month for smaller companies with $2 to $5 million in revenue and scaling up to 80 to 100 hours monthly for businesses approaching $10 million. This provides continuous strategic partnership—monthly financial reviews, quarterly forecast updates, ongoing tax planning, and unlimited access for strategic questions. At Bennett Financials, this is where we deliver the most value: acting as the navigator who charts the course to your revenue goal, monitors progress monthly, and alerts you to obstacles before they become crises.
When to Increase Hours or Hire a Full-Time CFO
The fractional model works brilliantly for most companies between $1 million and $10 million in revenue, but certain inflection points signal it’s time to either increase fractional hours significantly or transition to a full-time CFO.
- Crossing $10M–$15M Revenue: Once annual revenue consistently exceeds $10 million, the financial complexity and strategic demands often justify full-time CFO leadership. At this scale, you’re typically managing multiple departments, dealing with more sophisticated investors or lenders, and facing decisions about geographic expansion or product line diversification that require daily CFO involvement. However, this isn’t a hard rule—some $15 to $20 million businesses still thrive with a fractional CFO working 30 hours weekly, especially if they have a strong controller handling day-to-day financial operations.
- Series A Fundraising or Sale Prep: If you’re raising a Series A or preparing for acquisition, the time demands spike dramatically and often approach full-time for 3 to 6 months. You’ll need someone managing due diligence requests, updating financial models weekly, preparing board materials, and coordinating with attorneys and bankers—all while keeping regular financial operations running smoothly. Many companies increase their fractional CFO to near full-time hours during this period, then scale back down once the transaction closes.
- International Expansion: Opening operations in new countries introduces significant financial complexity: multi-currency accounting, international tax compliance, transfer pricing, and foreign entity management. This typically requires an additional 15 to 20 hours weekly from your fractional CFO, and if you’re expanding to multiple countries simultaneously, full-time CFO leadership often becomes necessary.
- Consistent Full-Time Need: If your business consistently needs 40 or more hours per week from your fractional CFO for more than six months, the economics start favoring a full-time hire. At that point, you’re paying fractional rates for full-time work, which often exceeds the all-in cost of a full-time CFO salary plus benefits. The transition point varies by market and CFO experience level, but as a general rule: if you need 160 or more hours monthly for an extended period, start recruiting for full-time.
Cost Benchmarks and ROI per Hour
Fractional CFOs typically charge between $175 and $400 per hour, with most experienced practitioners falling in the $225 to $300 range. Rates at the lower end often indicate someone with controller-level experience stretching into CFO work, while rates above $350 usually reflect former Big 4 partners or CFOs from public companies bringing specialized expertise. Geography matters less than you’d expect—remote work has compressed regional pricing differences, so you’ll see similar rates whether you’re in San Francisco, Austin, or Chicago.
Most fractional CFOs prefer monthly retainers over pure hourly billing, typically offering packages that blend strategic CFO work with some operational support. You can view our specific pricing to see how we structure these packages, commonly ranging from $8,000 to $15,000 per month for 40 to 60 hours, with the understanding that some months will be heavier—quarter-end, board meetings—and others lighter. Retainer pricing usually includes unlimited email and Slack access for quick questions, which provides significant value.
At Bennett Financials, we measure fractional CFO value through concrete financial outcomes, not just hours delivered:
- Tax savings: Proactive tax planning typically saves clients $80,000 to $250,000 annually, which alone often covers the entire CFO investment
- Margin expansion: Identifying and fixing profitability leaks usually improves gross margin by 3 to 8 percentage points within 12 months
- Cash runway extension: Better forecasting and cash management typically extends runway by 3 to 6 months, preventing expensive emergency financing
- Valuation improvement: Clean financials, strong KPIs, and clear growth trajectory can add 20 to 40 percent to exit valuation for companies preparing to sell
Fractional CFO vs Interim CFO vs Controller Time Commitments
Understanding the differences between financial roles helps you hire the right expertise for your current situation. While the titles sometimes get used interchangeably, they represent distinct skill sets and time commitments.
| Role | Typical Hours | Primary Focus | Best Fit |
| Fractional CFO | 10-30 hours/week | Strategic planning, growth modeling, tax strategy | Growing companies needing strategic guidance |
| Interim CFO | 40 hours/week | Full-time leadership during transition or crisis | Companies between CFOs or in turnaround |
| Controller | 20-40 hours/week | Monthly close, financial reporting, compliance | Companies needing operational accounting management |
A fractional CFO works part-time on an ongoing basis, typically 10 to 30 hours weekly, focused on strategy and high-level decision support. An interim CFO works full-time at 40 hours but temporarily—usually filling a gap between permanent CFOs or leading a company through a specific crisis or transaction. A controller works anywhere from 20 to 40 hours weekly, depending on company size, but focuses on operational accounting rather than strategy.
The fractional CFO owns strategic finance: building forecasts, developing growth plans, optimizing tax strategy, and translating financial data into business decisions. The interim CFO handles everything a full-time CFO would—strategic and operational—but on a temporary basis with the understanding they’ll transition out once a permanent hire is made. The controller manages the accounting function: monthly close, financial reporting, compliance, and accounting team supervision.
Many companies run with a controller handling operations and a fractional CFO providing strategic oversight. This combination often delivers better value than a single full-time CFO until revenue exceeds $10 to $15 million.
KPIs to Know Your Current Hours Are Working
The real test of fractional CFO effectiveness isn’t hours logged—it’s whether your business is getting more profitable, more predictable, and more valuable. Your gross profit margin improves by at least 3 to 5 percentage points within the first year of engaging a fractional CFO. This comes from better pricing strategy, identifying unprofitable clients or services, and optimizing your cost structure.
You gain clear visibility into your cash position 6 to 12 months forward, with forecast accuracy improving to within 10 to 15 percent of actuals. Your revenue and expense forecasts hit within 10 to 15 percent of actual results by month three of the engagement, tightening to within 5 to 10 percent by month six.
Proactive tax planning reduces your effective tax rate by 40 to 60 percent compared to what you’d pay with basic compliance-only accounting. More importantly, you have a clear plan for redeploying savings into growth initiatives—additional marketing spend, key hires, or technology investments that compound your growth rate.
Ready for Dependable Clarity? Talk to Bennett Financials
Bennett Financials combines strategic CFO services with proactive tax planning to create the financial intelligence system that exposes bottlenecks, drives better decisions, and compounds enterprise value. We act as the navigator who charts the course to your revenue goal, monitors progress monthly, and alerts you to obstacles before they become crises. Talk to our team to see how we can bring dependable clarity to your financial journey.
FAQs About Fractional CFO Hours
How many hours per week does a typical fractional CFO work?
Most fractional CFOs work between 10 and 30 hours per week per client, depending on company size and complexity. Smaller businesses may need only 5 to 10 hours monthly while scaling companies often require 20 or more hours weekly.
Can a fractional CFO work completely async?
While some tasks can be done independently, effective fractional CFOs need regular synchronous meetings with leadership teams for strategic discussions. Most successful engagements blend independent work with scheduled collaboration time.
How fast can hours scale up during a crisis?
Experienced fractional CFOs can typically increase availability within days during urgent situations like cash flow crises or acquisition opportunities. Many maintain capacity specifically for client emergencies and time-sensitive projects.
Do unused retainer hours roll over?
Most fractional CFO agreements operate on monthly retainers with limited rollover provisions. Some providers offer banked hours for quarterly use, while others focus on consistent monthly engagement rather than hour tracking.
