When to hire a CFO, and when you just need better reports

The question usually arrives in the same form: our accounts team is fine on compliance, but nobody is telling me what the numbers mean. Should we hire a CFO?

Three questions before the job description

• Do you receive a monthly pack in a fixed format, by a fixed date? If not, the gap is process, not seniority.
• Are decisions waiting on analysis nobody has time to do? That is a capacity problem, and it may be answered by a manager rather than a CFO.
• Are you about to raise money, restructure or sell? That is genuinely a CFO question, and it should be answered early.

A senior hire brought into a business without a reporting rhythm spends the first year building one. That is expensive work to buy at that level, and it is work an advisor can do in a quarter.

What a good monthly pack contains

Ten pages at most. Cash position and forecast, profit against budget with variances explained in words, working-capital days, margin by segment, and a one-page list of decisions required. If a pack takes more than ten minutes to read, it will not be read.