The five signals
One: you're making six-figure decisions with gut feel — a big hire, a lease, a product line — because nobody can model the outcome. Two: you're raising capital or taking on serious debt, and your numbers need to survive professional scrutiny. Three: cash is chronically tight despite paper profits, and nobody owns the forecast. Four: your board or investors are asking questions your monthly reports can't answer. Five: you're considering an exit within three years — because the financial infrastructure you build now directly moves the multiple.
Notice what's not on the list: revenue thresholds. A $2M SaaS burning venture money needs CFO thinking more than a $10M distributor with 30 years of steady history.
Why fractional beats full-time (for a while)
A credible full-time CFO costs $250–400K fully loaded, and most companies under $20M simply don't have five days a week of true CFO work. What they have is two to six days a month of high-stakes work — forecasting, board prep, capital strategy, pricing — and a lot of accounting work underneath it that a CFO shouldn't be doing anyway.
The fractional model matches cost to need: senior firepower for the decisions that matter, without paying an executive salary for the quiet weeks. And because a good virtual CFO arrives with a team behind them — accountants, FP&A analysts, systems people — you get a finance department, not just a title.
What good looks like in the first 90 days
A strong fractional CFO engagement produces visible artifacts fast: a 13-week cash forecast in the first month, a driver-based annual model by the second, a KPI dashboard and board package format by the third — plus at least one decision (pricing, spending, structure) where the analysis changed the answer. If you're three months in and can't point to those, you bought a title, not a function.
That 90-day arc is exactly how we structure Beryl's virtual CFO onboarding. If you're weighing the decision, a discovery call costs nothing and will at minimum sharpen the question.