So you’ve taken the plunge and hired a fractional CFO to help guide your business through its growth journey. But are they spending their time on the right tasks, or are they getting caught up in work that they should be delegating?
Whilst a fractional CFO has the skills to carry out a variety of routine financial activity there are many tasks that can divert their attention away from providing the strategic insight that is needed to drive your business forward.
By freeing your CFO from the 10 tasks below that they definitely shouldn’t be doing, you’ll not only maximise the value that you’re paying for, but you’ll also release their true potential.
1. Getting Bogged Down in the Detail
A CFO’s role is about big-picture thinking, not getting lost in the finer details. If your fractional CFO is spending hours diving into every aspect of financial activity, they’re missing the chance to shape strategy, drive growth, and advise on critical decisions. By delegating smaller tasks, you give your CFO the space to focus on what truly moves the business forward.
2. Paying Suppliers
We all agree that suppliers need to be paid on time, but it’s a task better suited to the accounts payable team (or individual). Processing payments can quickly become a time-consuming, repetitive task that pulls your CFO away from higher-priority responsibilities. CFOs shouldn’t be caught up in the day-to-day grind of manual payment processing.
3. Reconciling Bank Statements
A CFO’s expertise is best used on high-level insights rather than daily reconciliations. These tasks can be managed by accountants or finance assistants. When your fractional CFO focuses on reconciliations, they’re pulled away from high-level analysis and forecasting, which are far more impactful to your business’s financial health.
4. Submitting VAT Returns
VAT compliance is a must, but the actual process of filing returns is a routine task that can be handled by junior finance staff or outsourced. By passing this on, you free your fractional CFO to focus on more strategic work, like finding ways to optimise your overall tax position.
5. Preparing Payroll
Running payroll is the key to keeping your employees happy (and working), but it’s not something that should be taking up your fractional CFO’s time. A dedicated payroll team or outsourced provider can easily handle the task, which allows your CFO to focus on activities that drive financial performance.
6. Chasing Receivables
Unpaid invoices might be putting a strain on your cash flow, but having your fractional CFO chase down late payments is a huge waste of their expertise. Tracking down late payments doesn’t require strategic insight so why not leave it to a collections specialist or an outsourced team who can handle it efficiently.
7. Bookkeeping
The task of recording daily transactions should fall to bookkeepers, not CFOs. Their expertise is wasted on routine entries when they could be guiding financial strategy, assessing risks, and seeking growth opportunities.
8. Posting Month-End Journals
Keeping your financial reporting accurate means posting monthly-end journals.This task suits a finance team member who can ensure everything is recorded correctly, rather than your CFO. Instead, your fractional CFO can take a step back to analyse the numbers, uncover trends and provide meaningful insights to the business.
9. Reconciling your Balance Sheet
We’re not saying a fractional CFO should never look at your balance sheet, they should definitely review and understand it, but performing any required reconciliations themselves is a misuse of their skills. Delegating the task of reconciliation enables them to concentrate on strategic initiatives.
10. Supplier Management
Staying on friendly terms with suppliers and maintaining these relationships is important, however it doesn’t need direct involvement from a CFO. Having a finance or operations team who can stay in touch with suppliers and manage these relationships gives the CFO time to focus on things like cost efficiency and cash flow.
At the end of the day your CFO should be a strategic force, using their experience to guide the company through complex financial decisions, advise on growth opportunities, and assess risk. By offloading operational finance tasks to members of the finance team (or to a finance team-as-a-service) you enable your fractional CFO to focus on what they do best – driving the business forward. Helping a fractional CFO stay focused on high-level objectives means that they’ll have more time to deliver strategic insights, foster growth and position the company for long-term success.
