Growth Decisions
What should CFO support actually cost?
Shafneed10 September 20263 min read
In short
The price tells you which job is being sold. Published benchmarks put genuine strategic work well above the level at which bookkeeping is commonly relabelled as CFO services, so the question to ask is not what it costs but what is included and who does it.
Search for what a virtual CFO costs in India and you will find monthly retainers spanning roughly ₹25,000 to ₹2,50,000, sometimes quoted on the same page. That is a tenfold range for what is presented as the same service, and it is not explained by negotiation.
It is explained by the fact that three quite different jobs are being sold under one title.
What the published benchmarks say
Two things are reasonably consistent across public pricing guides.
- Retainers scale with stage. Early-stage engagements are commonly quoted around ₹25,000 to ₹50,000 a month, growth-stage around ₹50,000 to ₹1,00,000, and scale-ups above that.
- A full-time CFO in India is generally put in the region of ₹25 lakh to ₹60 lakh a year before equity, which is the comparison most of these pages are built around.
The more interesting observation, and one at least one published benchmark states directly, is that services advertised below roughly ₹40,000 a month are usually bookkeeping and compliance work relabelled as CFO services rather than board-level financial leadership.
That is worth sitting with, because it reframes the whole question. At the lower end you are frequently not getting a cheaper version of the same thing. You are getting a different thing.
The three jobs hiding under one title
Compliance, priced as advisory
Books maintained, GST and TDS filed, payroll processed, an MIS pack produced monthly. Genuinely useful work, competently delivered, and it is what a good accountant does. Sold as CFO services it is mostly a naming decision.
The tell is the deliverable. If what arrives each month is a report, and nobody is present when decisions get made, the engagement is reporting rather than advisory whatever the invoice says.
Reporting, dressed as decision support
A step up: a dashboard, a monthly review call, a model refreshed each quarter. Better, and still fundamentally backward-looking. The question this answers is what happened. The question a founder usually needs answered is what to do.
Actual decision support
Someone who knows the business well enough to have a view, is present when a hire, a price or a raise is being decided, and will tell you when the answer is that you do not need them. This is the work the upper half of the range is priced for.
Why the range is so wide
- Seniority. There is a real difference between someone who has run finance inside an operating company and someone who has only advised from outside.
- Time. Two days a month and two days a week are both called fractional.
- Scope. Whether compliance is bundled changes the number substantially, and often silently.
- Whether anyone is accountable for an outcome, or only for producing documents on time.
What to ask before you sign anything
Price is the last question, not the first. Six that come before it.
- 01Who actually does the work, and what have they run? Not who signs the proposal.
- 02Is compliance included or separate? If included, who performs it, and does that person also do the thinking?
- 03What arrives each month, and what would I do with it?
- 04Are you in the room when we decide something, or do you report on it afterwards?
- 05What is out of scope? An answer that names nothing is not an answer.
- 06Under what circumstances would you tell me I do not need this?
What this is worth against the alternative
The honest comparison is not fractional against full-time. It is fractional against the status quo, which for most founders is answering financial questions themselves, late at night, without the time to do it properly.
That status quo has a cost. It is just not on an invoice: decisions made later than they should be, a price left unchanged for a year longer than it should have been, a hire made on optimism, a raise started with three months of runway instead of nine.
Simplify does not publish a rate, because the shape of the work varies too much for a number to mean anything useful in advance. What is worth saying is that the questions above are the right ones to ask of anybody, including us.
Sources
Who wrote this
Shafneed is the founder of Simplify, a finance clarity and investment readiness practice working with founders across India. He writes about the questions founders bring before a decision, not after it.
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