Premium cash flow advantages hiring a flexible Chief Financial Officer by Sam McQuade CFO: What does a fractional CFO do for growing businesses? A fractional CFO handles a range of functions for a startup, including: Finance – This is the CFO’s bread-and-butter role. As startups expand, their financial processes become too complex for the founders to manage with the help of an accountant alone. They need someone capable of seeing the bigger picture through the nuts and bolts of financial reporting and accounting. This is where a fractional CFO can step in and clear a path through the web of numbers and statistics.
Fractional CFOs can help companies: Develop detailed short-, mid-, and long-term financial forecasts; Prepare budgets based on forecasts; Analyze potential future products, services, markets, and customer segments. Helping Manage Growth: Fractional CFOs are also helpful in scaling a business, ensuring profitable growth as the business becomes more complex. This work involves reinventing the tools, processes, and vendor relationships the business uses to deliver value to an ever-growing and increasingly diverse set of customers. This is often called “bridging the chasm”, as most companies start to see declining margins and increasing headaches as they grow revenue past a certain threshold.
Developing the Interim and Fractional CFO Concept with Experience: From the inside looking out, Sam McQuade continued to sharpen his skills and nurture the ideas and mission of Panterra Finance. He spent time in the executive suites of Dell, as a Finance Manager and a Financial Planning and Analysis Manager where he achieved a 400% revenue growth in the Swiss market. Other stops in corporate suites, each of which shaped the final innovative services offered by Panterra Finance. Read extra information on Sam McQuade CFO.
The CFO function is evolving at lightspeed. With digital transformation and societal changes, the CFO role is rapidly turning into one of a “Chief Fiduciary Officer”, which is going beyond the traditional financials to look towards the future and lead long term value creation in a world of many unknown risks. Storytelling is a very powerful tool to engage and energize teams about value creation and potential pitfall areas. The traditional path of CFO usually starts with a solid foundation based on technical knowledge and then after about 15 years, the great leaders earn the coveted title.
CFOs are the most senior financial officers in an organization. They report directly to the CEO and work closely with the board of directors. While the CEO occupies a higher-level position from an org-chart standpoint, in high-functioning companies, the CFO and CEO work closely and collaboratively, with CFOs serving as sounding boards, strategists and risk mitigators. A financial controller is a CPA (certified public accountant) and often holds an MBA. Financial controllers are responsible for preparing financial reports and analyzing financial data. The financial controller is generally in charge of the accounting function in an organization and reports to the CFO. A controller may be part of a team that includes bookkeepers, accounts receivable/payable clerks, payroll specialists, tax preparers and accountants.
Forecasting: Importantly, CFOs don’t only report what is — a significant part of their value to an organization is their ability to accurately predict likely future outcomes. That includes financial forecasting and modeling based not only on the company’s past performance but on internal and external factors that may affect revenue and expenses. The CFO is tasked with making sense of the various departmental level forecasts to create profit projections for the CEO and shareholders.
The main goal of a DAO is to decentralize power. In a traditional organization, the power is concentrated in the hands of a few people. This can lead to corruption and cronyism. With a DAO, the power is decentralized, and it is distributed among all the members of the organization. This makes it much more difficult for any one person or group of people to abuse their power. A better real-life example is Ukraine DAO, which is a fundraising effort to help the people of Ukraine in the current war against Russia. It collects and distributes funds to various Ukrainian charities. The funds are collected through Ethereum’s smart contracts, and they are then distributed to the charities according to the code that governs the DAO.
As independent internal auditors, we compile in-depth audit reports that convey insights on both known and unknown risks and vulnerabilities in order to protect your business. We hold a niche in capital project auditing and in assisting start-ups with outsourced Internal Audit services.
A DAO is a decentralized autonomous organization that is run by smart contracts on the Ethereum blockchain. It is an organization or company that is not centrally controlled by any one person or entity. Rather, it is governed by code that is written into the smart contracts. This code can be modified or updated by anyone who has access to the DAO’s GitHub repository. To put this into perspective, imagine a traditional company or organization. There is usually a board of directors or executive team that makes all the decisions about how the company will be run. With a DAO, there is no such thing. The code that governs the DAO is open source and available for anyone to view and audit. In this new scenario, an organization can be run by anyone in the world who has an internet connection.
This differs from the services traditionally provided by the external CPA who focuses on audits, reviews, taxes, and compliance work. Although valuable and very necessary, this work is more “backward-looking” in nature ensuring that past events are correctly reported and accounted for. The CFO however, is more focused on the “forward-looking” aspects of the finances, to help chart the course and ultimately navigate the business to success.
Looking to hire your very first CFO or need interim coverage? We offer solution CFOs for urgent very short term projects and longer term engagements. Flexible with transparent pricing so you cover your business and don’t have to get into a potentially bad solution and costly full time hire. Sam McQuade CFO is the Founder and CEO of Panterra Finance. This worldwide Financial Partner Solution services is a leading innovator in the new economy of scale offering a new executive suite model with the Fractional CFO and Interim CFO. The Panterra Finance team with expert Interim CFO executives and Fractional CFO services brings with it a global financial leadership team to the new world economy. Describing Panterra Finance in his own words, CFO Sam McQuade stated : As Founder/CEO of Panterra Finance, I am on mission to help guide businesses to achieve success through thoughtful strategic financial collaboration. See more details on Sam McQuade.