Too big for a bookkeeper alone. Too small to justify a £90,000 finance director. A CIMA-qualified FD working with you monthly, for a fixed fee — and telling you what the numbers mean, not just what they are.
Book a free 30-minute review →There is a stage almost every growing business reaches where the bookkeeping is fine and the decisions are getting harder. Turnover is enough that mistakes cost real money. Staff, stock and fixed costs have arrived. A bank or an investor has started asking questions.
And nobody in the building can answer the question "should we?" from the numbers.
A full-time finance director would solve it and cost £90,000 by the time you count employer National Insurance and pension — for a job that, at this size, genuinely takes two or three days a month. That mismatch is the entire reason this service exists.
The word that matters is director. This is not bookkeeping and it is not routine compliance — it is the layer above both.
A proper monthly read on performance, with the accruals, prepayments, revenue recognition and stock adjustments that make one month comparable to the last — and written commentary explaining what moved and why. See the management accounts service.
The professional treasury standard: far enough ahead to act, close enough to be accurate. Adjusted for how your customers actually pay rather than the terms on the invoice, which is usually the difference between a forecast and a wish.
An annual budget worth having, and then the monthly discipline of actual against plan — with the reasons, not just the numbers.
A pack formatted for whoever is reading it, covering performance against plan, cash and forecast, and the specific covenants or metrics they care about. Same underlying work, different reader.
Which products, jobs, sites or customers actually make money — with overheads absorbed properly rather than spread evenly. This is core management accounting and it routinely changes what a business does the following week.
Pricing, hiring, borrowing, capital investment, whether to take the big contract. The "should we?" questions, answered against real numbers rather than instinct.
| Option | Typical UK market cost | What you get |
|---|---|---|
| Employed FD | £70k–£110k+ salary, plus employer NI, pension, benefits | Five days a week — more capacity than most SMEs under £5m need |
| Virtual / outsourced FD | Commonly £800–£2,500 per month | The strategic output, scaled to what you actually need |
| Interim / project FD | Several hundred pounds per day | Cover for a gap, or one defined piece of work |
| Bookkeeper only | Typically £100–£400 per month | Transactions recorded — no interpretation, no strategy |
So the arithmetic is roughly a fifth to a third of the fully loaded cost of employing someone — because you are buying the output rather than filling a week.
The ranges are wide because "virtual FD" covers wildly different scopes. At the lower end it may be a monthly pack and a review call. At the upper end it is the entire finance function. When comparing quotes, compare what is included, not the headline number.
In UK SME practice, essentially no. CFO tends to be used by venture-backed and technology businesses and implies more fundraising and investor work. FD is the more common British term and implies closer involvement in operational finance. Fractional and portfolio describe the same part-time arrangement from the practitioner's side.
What matters is scope and qualification, not the title on the invoice.
It tends to fit when:
It is probably not right if you are early stage with a simple cost base (a good bookkeeper and accountant will do), or if you genuinely need someone in the building five days a week, in which case hire.
Check the qualification. Neither "finance director" nor "accountant" is a protected title in the UK. You want a chartered professional — CIMA, ACCA or ICAEW — who is regulated, insured and AML-supervised. The letters are the check, and they are worth asking about.
Ask who actually does the work. The value is a senior person looking at your numbers every month. If the answer is a team, a portal or a process, you are buying something different from what you think. It is a fair question and the answer is revealing.
Peter Edwards ACMA CGMA — Chartered Management Accountant, CIMA Member in Practice, twenty-five years in senior finance including Finance Director roles across pharmaceutical distribution, manufacturing and professional services. Board packs built and defended, eight-figure cash positions managed, Xero and Sage implementations led.
Personally, every month. The client list is kept deliberately small so that stays true.
More background in the guide: outsourced finance director — what you actually get and what it costs. Regional pages for Northamptonshire, Cambridge and Rutland. Delivered on your existing Xero, or on Sage 50 or Sage 200, remotely across the UK, with in-person meetings across Northamptonshire and the surrounding counties.
Everything a finance director tells you is built on the bookkeeping underneath. Seven questions you can answer from memory — no logins, no exports — and an honest verdict on whether your figures can be relied on.
Run the free Books Check → Or book a 30-minute review