Senior financial leadership embedded in your team. Board meetings, investor relations, financial strategy, and finance function oversight — without the full-time salary, equity dilution, or long-term commitment of a permanent hire.
This is not advisory from the outside. Our team joins your board meetings, attends investor calls, and owns deliverables alongside you — the same way a full-time CFO would, but on a flexible engagement that grows or contracts with your needs.
Long-range planning, capital allocation frameworks, unit economics, and financial modelling that ties commercial decisions to measurable outcomes — not just spreadsheets.
Board pack preparation, investor reporting, managing LP communications, and fielding financial due diligence — presenting your business credibly to the people who matter most.
Monthly management accounts, rolling forecasts, variance analysis, and KPI dashboards — structured so your leadership team has the information they need, when they need it.
13-week cash forecasting, working capital optimisation, and runway modelling that gives you and your investors a clear, honest picture of where the business stands.
Statutory reporting, audit readiness, internal controls, and multi-jurisdiction compliance — ensuring the business is clean and scalable, not just reporting accurate numbers.
Hiring plans, system selection, process design, and team oversight — building the infrastructure around you that scales beyond the engagement itself.
The fractional CFO model works when the CFO is genuinely inside the business — not reviewing deliverables from a distance once a month. That means attending your board meetings, being available when an investor asks an unexpected question, and knowing your numbers well enough to defend them under scrutiny.
We work directly with your CEO, your finance team (if you have one), and your investors — integrating into your existing rhythms rather than imposing a separate layer of process on top of them.
Engagements typically start with a Finance Diagnostic — a structured review of your current reporting, forecasting, and finance function — which establishes the baseline and shapes what gets prioritised first.
Most businesses that engage a fractional CFO are at a moment of transition — a fundraise coming up, rapid growth straining the existing finance function, a new market entry, or preparation for exit. They need senior capability now, not in six months when a permanent hire could be onboarded.
Cognos Advisory works primarily with businesses between £1M and £50M in revenue, PE/VC-backed or approaching institutional capital for the first time, and operating across at least two jurisdictions. SaaS, professional services, MedTech, EdTech, and legal-tech are sectors with direct prior experience.
The business does not need to have an existing finance team. Some clients have a bookkeeper or management accountant in place; others are working from a Xero login and a shared folder. Both starting points work.
The tell is usually not a crisis — it's a pattern of decisions being made without the financial rigour to support them. These are the signals most commonly seen before an engagement begins.
Revenue is discussed but not disaggregated. Cash is monitored but not forecasted. Variance to plan is reported but not explained. The numbers are present; the insight is not.
Serious investors will scrutinise your financial model, your assumptions, your cap table, and your data room — in detail. Preparing for that without senior financial support is a significant risk.
When the founder is signing off on monthly accounts, chasing management information, and fielding investor financial questions, the business is underinvested in its finance capability.
Cross-border compliance, transfer pricing, multi-currency consolidation, and multi-entity group structures require expertise that a local bookkeeper or part-time accountant cannot provide.
Financial due diligence is where deals are delayed and price is chipped. Getting the business financially clean — accounts, contracts, liabilities, earn-out structures — is CFO work.
Headcount has scaled, product lines have expanded, but the reporting has not kept pace. Decisions are being made on stale or incomplete information — and the gap is widening.
Most engagements begin with a 30-minute call. No preparation needed — just tell us where you are and what you're trying to achieve.
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