Fractional controller services

What is a fractional controller?

A fractional controller is an experienced financial controller who works for your business part-time, on an ongoing basis, instead of being hired full-time. They own the accuracy of your financials — the monthly close, balance-sheet reconciliations, AP and AR discipline, and the internal controls that make the reporting reliable — for a fraction of the cost of a salaried controller. Most companies bring one in at the point where the books have outgrown a bookkeeper but the workload still doesn’t justify a six-figure full-time hire.

“Fractional” and “outsourced” describe the same arrangement in practice: a senior finance professional embedded in your business, working a defined portion of the month. The difference people usually mean is one of posture. An outsourced controller is often positioned as a vendor delivering a service. A fractional controller is a member of your team who happens not to be full-time — in your systems, in your close calendar, on the call when something looks off. We work the second way.

Week to week, that looks like this: your controller runs a defined close calendar, reconciles the balance sheet, reviews coding before a bad habit hardens into a bad trend, chases the receivable that has quietly aged past sixty days, and produces a reporting package that means the same thing this month as it did last month. When a number looks wrong, you hear it from them first.

The role that makes your numbers trustworthy

A controller owns the accuracy of your financials. Where the CFO sets strategy, the controller makes sure the numbers underneath it are right: a timely monthly close, reconciled accounts, disciplined AP and AR, and reporting that ties out. For an agency, that means you can act on your P&L instead of second-guessing it.

Our controllers run a structured close calendar, tighten your chart of accounts around agency realities like project revenue and pass-through costs, and put controls in place so the same numbers mean the same thing month after month. When your CFO walks into a board meeting, the reporting behind them holds up.

The agency specifics are where a generalist controller loses time and you lose money. Media pass-through booked as revenue inflates the top line and flatters margin. Work in progress that nobody tracks turns earned fees into fees quietly written off. Retainers recognized on the invoice date rather than as the work is delivered make a good month look great and the following one look broken. Our controllers arrive already knowing where those errors live, because they have made an agency’s books tell the truth before.

Fractional controller vs. fractional CFO

The short version: a fractional controller makes sure the numbers are right, and a fractional CFO decides what to do about them. The controller looks backward and inward — recording, reconciling, closing, controlling. The CFO looks forward and outward — forecasting, pricing, capital, growth. They are different disciplines, not two rungs of the same ladder, and hiring one when you needed the other is the most common and most expensive staffing mistake a growing business makes.

If you can only fund one of them right now, start with the controller. A CFO working on top of unreliable books spends the engagement doing controller work anyway, and you will have paid CFO rates for it. Get the close clean first — the strategy layer is far cheaper to add once the data underneath it holds.

The exception is a business facing a specific, dated event: a raise, a sale, a lender covenant, a pricing reset. Those are CFO problems and they don’t wait. Even then, the first thing a good fractional CFO will do is find out whether the numbers can be trusted.

CFO and controller — why agencies need both

A common mistake is hiring one and expecting the other. A CFO without a controller ends up cleaning up ledgers instead of steering the business; a controller without a CFO produces accurate reports that no one turns into decisions. We staff both, at the right level, so strategy and integrity reinforce each other rather than competing for the same person’s time.

Because both seats come from the same firm, the handoff between them stops being your problem. The forecast your CFO builds is fed by the close your controller runs, in the same chart of accounts, on the same calendar. Nobody spends the first week of the quarter reconciling two versions of the truth. If you want the forward-looking layer as well, that’s FP&A and financial analysis, and it sits directly on top of this one.

Two roles in one seat — usually the better deal

In practice, most of our controllers handle the bookkeeping as well as the controllership — two roles in one seat. It sounds counterintuitive, but it is usually the most economical setup: an experienced controller works far faster than a dedicated bookkeeper, so the same clean books get done in less time, and with a sharper eye watching them.

We only bring in a separate bookkeeper from our team when the work is almost entirely data entry and transactional — high-volume, low-judgment. At that point a more cost-effective resource makes sense, and you can read how we staff that in bookkeeping and accounting. Either way, you pay for the right level of work, and nothing more.

What does a fractional controller cost?

A fractional controller typically runs $2,000 to $8,000 a month, or roughly $75 to $150 an hour where an engagement is billed hourly. A full-time controller costs $110,000 to $180,000 in base salary before benefits, payroll taxes, and recruiting fees — call it $150,000 to $230,000 all-in. The fractional version is cheaper for a simple reason: you are buying the portion of the role you actually consume rather than the whole seat.

Four things move the number. Transaction volume. Entity and revenue complexity — multiple entities, project-based revenue, and media pass-through all add work. The condition of the books when we arrive. And whether the engagement includes the day-to-day bookkeeping, which most of ours do. A single-entity agency with tidy books and a few hundred transactions a month sits near the bottom of that range. Several entities, an unreconciled balance sheet, and nine months of unclosed periods sit near the top — and the first ninety days of a cleanup usually cost more than the steady state that follows it.

We quote a monthly budget against a defined scope rather than billing by the hour, because hourly billing punishes you for asking questions. The budget is reviewable as the work changes, and cleanup is scoped and priced separately from the ongoing close, so you can see plainly what is one-time and what recurs.

Set against the alternative, the arithmetic usually isn’t close. A business that needs twenty to sixty hours of controller-level work a month is paying a full salary for a seat it uses a quarter of the time — and, in our experience, still not getting a clean close, because the person in that seat has nobody senior reviewing their work. For the same comparison on the strategy side, see what a fractional CFO costs.

What’s included

• Monthly close on a defined calendar
• Day-to-day bookkeeping and transaction coding, most engagements
• Balance-sheet reconciliations and controls
• AP/AR oversight and cash application
• GAAP-aligned financial statements
• Revenue recognition, WIP, and pass-through handled correctly
• Audit, tax, and lender support
• Chart of accounts built for agency economics
• Cleanup and catch-up for overdue closes, scoped separately