How do you tell a good one from an expensive one?
Almost every firm in this market describes itself the same way, and the descriptions do not distinguish between very different kinds of work. Here is what to ask, what to check independently, and the specific answers that should end a conversation.
The category word hides three different jobs
Virtual CFO, fractional CFO, outsourced CFO and CFO services are used interchangeably in India, and behind them sit at least three genuinely different offerings sold at very different prices.
- Compliance work with a better title
- Bookkeeping, GST and TDS returns, payroll processing and annual filings, packaged as a CFO service. Useful work that every company needs, and it is accounting rather than finance. The tell is that the deliverables are all filings and the reporting is a P&L with no commentary.
- Reporting production
- Someone builds and runs a monthly pack. Genuinely valuable if what you lack is the pack. The tell is that the scope describes documents and never decisions, and that nothing in it changes what you do.
- Judgement on decisions
- Someone whose work is to look at the numbers, say what they mean, and be useful on the handful of decisions a year that are hard to reverse. The reporting exists to make that possible rather than being the point.
All three are legitimate and you should know which you are buying. Most disappointment in this market comes from paying for the third and receiving the first.
The questions worth asking
Ask these of anyone you are considering, including us. The answers separate people quickly, and most of them are uncomfortable to answer vaguely.
- 01Who will actually do the work, and what else are they doing? In a firm, the person in the meeting is frequently not the person producing the work. Ask for the name and the number of other clients they carry.
- 02What did you produce for a company like ours in the last quarter? Not results, which nobody can share, but artefacts: what did the pack contain, what did the model look like, what decisions was it built for.
- 03What would you do in the first thirty days? A good answer starts with reconciliations, definitions and understanding how the business earns. A weak one starts with a dashboard.
- 04What does this depend on from us? Anyone who says nothing has not done this before. The real answer involves your books, your data and one person who can get answers.
- 05What do you not do? An adviser who claims bookkeeping, tax, audit, fundraising, legal and strategy is describing a category rather than a job.
- 06How is the work handed over? Ask specifically whether your team could produce next month's pack without them. If the answer is unclear, you are buying a dependency.
- 07What happens if we want to stop? Notice period, what you keep, and whether anything stops working.
What to check rather than ask
- Their own writing. Anyone doing this work has views about how it should be done. Read what they have published and see whether it is specific enough to disagree with, or whether it could have been written about any company in any country.
- Whether their examples carry Indian detail. GST input credit, TDS sections, the April to March year, the labour codes, MSME payment terms. A finance adviser who writes about 401(k) plans and quotes American benchmarks without adjustment has not worked here.
- Their qualifications, stated precisely. Chartered Accountant, CA Intermediate, MBA, years in industry. Vagueness here is a choice.
- Who they have actually worked with, in whatever form they can share it. Operating experience inside companies is different from advisory experience, and both are different from having run a practice. All three are fine. Knowing which you are getting is the point.
- Whether they will say no to something. An adviser who agrees that every problem you describe is in scope has told you something about how the engagement will go.
The single most useful check is the first one. Nobody can fake a body of specific writing about a market they do not know.
The answers that should end a conversation
- A guaranteed outcome. Anyone promising a margin improvement, a funding round or a valuation before seeing your numbers is selling something they cannot deliver.
- Client names and results offered without evidence of permission. If they will discuss another company's numbers with you, they will discuss yours with the next person.
- A proposal that cannot say what is handed over. Vagueness in the scope becomes vagueness in the delivery.
- Pressure to sign quickly, or a discount that expires. Finance advisory is not a business with a reason for urgency.
- Unwillingness to start small. Anyone confident in the work should be comfortable proving it on a defined piece before a long commitment.
- A fee tied to money raised, on fundraising work. It creates an incentive to close a round rather than to close the right one, and the finance work and the raising should be separate people anyway.
Comparing two proposals properly
Two proposals with similar monthly figures can differ by a factor of three in what they actually contain. Put them side by side on these lines rather than on price.
- Who does the work, and what proportion of it is the senior person named in the meeting.
- What is delivered every month, listed as documents and conversations rather than as adjectives.
- What is included once and what recurs. A model built at the start is a different commitment from a model maintained monthly.
- How much time, and whether it is capped. Unlimited availability in a proposal usually means undefined availability in practice.
- What happens to work that falls outside scope, and how that gets priced.
- Notice period and what you retain on exit.
- And what each proposal assumes about the state of your books, because the one that assumes they are fine will reprice in month two.
The published guide to what CFO support costs on this site works through the comparison in more detail, including what to ask a reference. Both proposals should survive that exercise before price becomes the deciding factor.
Match the person to the problem
There is no best adviser in this market, only a reasonable fit for a specific gap. Three rough cases.
- If your books are unreliable and filings are late, your first problem is accounting. A good CA firm solves it more cheaply and more completely than anyone selling strategy, and strategy built on bad books is worthless anyway.
- If the numbers are fine and nobody has time to produce the reporting, you need capacity. That can be a hire, an outsourced controller, or reporting production bought as a service.
- If the reporting exists and the decisions still feel like guesses, you need judgement. That is a different purchase and it is the one this site is about.
Sector experience matters less than founders expect, with two exceptions. A business with unusual unit economics, such as healthcare with payer mix and exempt supplies, or food service with aggregator commissions, is genuinely faster to help with if someone has seen it before. And a business selling abroad has currency and export questions that are specific. Otherwise, the quality of thinking travels.
What we would say about ourselves
Applying the same test to this practice, honestly.
- This is a solo practice. The person you speak to is the person who does the work, which limits how many companies can be taken on and means availability is a real constraint rather than a formality.
- The background is operating rather than advisory: six years inside startups, moving from core finance into FP&A, modelling, unit economics and investor reporting, including four years in one healthcare business from early stage into the founding team. ICAI Intermediate, not a qualified Chartered Accountant, which is why bookkeeping, filings, tax positions and audit stay with your CA firm.
- There are no client case studies, testimonials or named results on this site, because none has been cleared for publication. The published writing is the evidence available, and there is a great deal of it.
- No pricing is published, because it depends on the shape of the work and the state of the numbers. The comparison method is published instead.
- Some problems are better solved by your existing accountant, and you will be told so in the first conversation rather than after a proposal.
If that reads as a set of limitations, it is meant to. The purpose of a buyer's guide is to help you decide, including deciding against, and a page that applied the test to everyone except its author would not be worth reading.