Why remote CFO is the future

Small and medium companies have financial needs, and at a certain point, which may be different for different businesses, there needs to be a person in charge of those financial needs, and there can be a graduation of sorts, from a bookkeeper to an accountant, to a Chief Financial Officer and finally to an accounting department. The gains made by having a specific person or group of people dealing with money are obvious; having a person who just deals with money, who specializes in dealing with money, means that they are, at least in theory, much better at it than the average layperson.

Why should this model change? What makes this model bad?

The model isn’t bad per se, but outsourcing can be more efficient. Why is an outsource CFO better than the one I can see down the hall? You are paying for their physical presence. There is a surcharge that you pay to have that person in your physical presence every day. You also pay for their office space, office supplies, and sometimes even their company vehicle. Online CFOs replace that person in the office. They can replace the entire accounting department as your various departments get trained on how to submit things to the accounting cloud. Remote CFOs charge a flat rate, and tell you ahead of time if there is going to be a change to that or if what you are asking will have additional charges. Also, if scaling is needed, Remote CFOs take care of that. Your accounting actually needs to be taken care of by three people? We hire them, we take care of that. We model efficiency because the more efficient we are with your account, the more money we can make overall. That step of removing the accounting from the structure also insulates the company because Remote CFOs and their employees don’t have direct access to the accounts and there are a lot more steps involved in an embezzlement scheme, making them less likely to happen, more likely to get discovered early, and less impactful to companies when they do happen.