Hiring guide
Your fractional CFO's first 90 days: an acceptance plan
By CFO Index · Published
A first-90-days plan should make it possible to tell whether useful work has been delivered. Agree the outputs and dependencies before starting. The sequence below is an illustrative onboarding plan, not a promise that every company's finance problems can be fixed within three months.
Before day one: identify the owner of each input
Name the person responsible for accounting exports, bank information, payroll totals, sales pipeline and major commitments. Agree how the CFO receives access and who approves it. Record the most urgent management decision and the next unavoidable deadline. If records are incomplete, say so in the scope. A delayed forecast caused by missing data needs a different remedy from one caused by an unavailable provider.
Days 1–30: establish what can be trusted
Request a source inventory, a list of unresolved differences and an initial view of cash commitments. Have the CFO trace a sample figure from a management report to its source. Mark provisional figures visibly. The acceptance test is not 'dashboard delivered'; it is that management understands which figures are reliable enough for the named decision and which still need work. Assign the repairs rather than merely documenting them.
Days 31–60: build a decision case
Choose one real choice such as a hiring wave, supplier commitment or product expansion. Ask for a base case and a downside case with the assumptions visible. Retain the previous forecast so actual outcomes can later be compared with it. This is management planning, not an audit. The SEC's financial-statement guide explains why profit and cash tell different stories; your decision case should not silently substitute one for the other.
Days 61–90: make the process repeatable
Run the next reporting cycle with your own input owners. Check whether someone other than the model's author can update an assumption, explain a movement and reproduce an output. Agree a short management meeting with decisions and owners recorded. If the CFO still needs to manually reconstruct every input, decide whether the continuing scope needs operations support rather than accepting a permanently fragile process.
Review progress without invented ROI
Compare delivered outputs against the signed brief: report timeliness, unresolved reconciliation items, forecast updates and completed decisions. Set targets from your starting position, not a generic benchmark. Do not attribute every improvement in revenue or cash to the CFO. Record which actions management actually took and which external factors changed. This makes the renewal discussion more useful than asking whether the engagement 'paid for itself' in an arbitrary period.
What if the plan slips?
Classify the cause: missing access, underestimated cleanup, changed business priorities or provider capacity. Re-sequence the work in writing, with a new owner and date for each critical output. A reasonable plan can change; unexplained slippage should not become the operating model. At the review, choose whether to continue, narrow the mandate or move to a different mix of accounting and finance leadership.