You need senior financial leadership when you actually need it, at a fraction of the cost. Most nonprofit boards never hear that this is an option.
Same caliber of financial leadership. Without the salary, the benefits, or the empty chair on the slow months.
Most nonprofit leaders assume the only way to get real financial expertise is to hire someone full time. A salary. Benefits. A person at a desk whether the work is there that week or not. For an organization your size, that math rarely works, so the decision gets deferred, and the bookkeeper absorbs one more thing.
Fractional means you engage an experienced CFO for a set monthly retainer. You pay for the expertise, not the seat. For most nonprofits that lands at a fraction of the cost of one full-time hire, and you get someone considerably more senior than the role you were about to post.
If you have a bookkeeper or a staff accountant, but nobody giving your executive director and your board a clear, strategic financial picture, that gap is exactly what this is built to close. And if the whole idea is new to you, that is normal. Most boards have never been shown it.
On titles: some organizations call this role a CFO, others call it a finance director, and the line between them is mostly a matter of budget size and habit. I fill either one. What matters is not the title on the org chart, it is whether someone senior is actually looking at your numbers.
None of these mean anything is broken. They mean the organization has gotten more complex than the current setup was ever designed to handle.
This is the work, whether the engagement is a few days a month or something closer to an embedded finance director.
Real financial leadership, not a staff accountant keeping the lights on. Strategy, capital planning, board and lender conversations, and the kind of judgment that usually only arrives with a six-figure hire.
This is where I do my most valuable work. ERP evaluations and implementations, QuickBooks conversions and cleanups, and finance functions rebuilt around current tooling and AI-assisted workflows. The result is usually the same: the work gets faster, the reporting gets better, and it costs materially less to run than it did before.
Clean numbers on demand. Grant tracking that tells you exactly where every restricted dollar stands. Reporting your board can trust, so you are audit-ready continuously instead of once a year under pressure.
Almost every nonprofit I walk into is running a finance function that was assembled years ago and never revisited. Fixing that is the single fastest way to cut cost and get your numbers back.
I have run full ERP implementations, including for an organization with a quarter million members across 360 chapters. I can tell you honestly whether you actually need to move systems, and if you do, run the project so it does not become a two year ordeal.
Moving onto QuickBooks Online, moving off of it, or fixing years of accumulated mess inside it. Including chart of accounts rebuilds that make fund and grant tracking work the way it is supposed to instead of living in a side spreadsheet.
I build finance workflows around current automation and AI tooling. Reconciliations, grant reporting, board packages, and close tasks that consumed days now take hours. This is not theory. It is how I run every engagement, and it is why the cost math works.
Donor and fundraising platforms, payroll, grant management, and the general ledger, connected so the same number does not get keyed in three places. Fewer errors, faster close, and reporting you can trust without re-checking.
Reporting redesigned around the questions your board actually asks. Real-time visibility into restricted and unrestricted funds, grant burn, and cash, available on demand rather than six weeks after month end.
Everything gets documented and handed over. The process survives my tenure and the next staff transition, which means you are buying an improvement to the organization, not a dependency on one consultant.
Why this matters more than it sounds: most nonprofits respond to a struggling finance function by adding another seat. Modernizing the systems first usually gets you better numbers for less money, and it is the reason a fractional engagement can replace more capacity than its cost would suggest.
I am a CPA and a career CFO, and most of my work now is with nonprofits. Fund accounting, grant compliance, board and committee reporting, audit readiness, and the systems underneath all of it.
Before nonprofits became the focus, I spent years leading finance across other industries, including investor-backed growth companies, real estate, global agency operations, and consumer platforms, with a public accounting foundation at PwC.
That range comes up more than you would expect. Nonprofits are rarely just nonprofits. Many carry real estate, earned-revenue ventures, or subsidiary entities, and that is usually the point where a nonprofit-only accountant runs out of road.
Thirty minutes. You describe where things stand, I tell you honestly whether this is a fit. No deck, no pressure, and no obligation on either side.
If it makes sense to keep going, I review your close process, reporting, grant tracking, and systems, then show you specifically what is costing you time and money.
We scope it to what you actually need, at a monthly retainer your board can approve without flinching. Scale it up or down as the organization changes.
Even if we never work together, you will leave knowing what your options are and roughly what they cost. Most nonprofit leaders have never been given that picture. Start there.
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