Three things you can require from a seed or Series A company before the next board meeting, none of which require anyone to hire a CFO: a monthly close that lands by day 15, a rolling 13-week cash view the founder maintains, and a model whose actuals tie back to the accounting. Most of your companies have none of the three, and the reason isn't cost. It's that the standard advice — "get your books cleaned up" — solves a different problem than the one that shows up in diligence.
CRV's own guidance to founders puts a fractional CFO at $1M to $3M ARR, says companies from seed through Series A typically run a controller plus a fractional CFO, and calls three months a reasonable minimum lead time before a raise. That matches what we see from the inside. The gap between that advice and what actually exists at your companies is the whole subject of this piece.
Founders hear one instruction and buy one thing. There are three distinct failures here, and they need three different people.
Transactions uncategorized, the founder's card in the P&L, bank accounts unreconciled since March. Real, common, and the cheapest thing on this list to fix. A bookkeeper solves it in weeks. Our Foundation tier starts at $1,000/mo; a one-time historical cleanup starts at $2,500.
The books close whenever someone gets to them. There is no day 15, because nobody owns day 15. This is a process failure, not a staffing failure — a company can have a perfectly competent bookkeeper and still take six weeks to know what happened in a month. A close process build starts at $2,000. It's a one-time fix that changes every board meeting after it.
Nobody at the company can answer "what happens to runway if we hire two AEs in March and the enterprise deal slips a quarter." Not because the founder is bad at spreadsheets, but because the model that answers that question has to be maintained against actuals every month by someone whose job that is. No bookkeeper will ever do this. It isn't in the role, at any price.
When you tell a founder to clean up their numbers, they hear problem one and hire for problem one. Six months later you're in the same board meeting looking at the same stale model, and now the company has a bookkeeper and still can't tell you when it runs out of money.
Asking a $400K company for a board pack is how you teach a founder that finance is theater. The requirement should scale with the company.
Pre-seed and seed, under roughly $1M. Monthly close by day 15. Bank reconciliations current. A runway number the founder can defend without opening a spreadsheet mid-meeting. That's the whole list. CRV puts this stage at bookkeeper-plus-founder and that's fair — but the close date is the part everyone skips, and it's the part that makes everything above it possible.
Seed to Series A, roughly $1M to $5M. Add the rolling 13-week cash view and a model that reconciles to actuals. This is the band where the term-sheet model goes stale, because it was built once, by the founder, for you, and then the person who built it went back to selling. A 13-week cash flow build starts at $2,500 as a project; ongoing, active cash management is $3K/mo under $5M in revenue. If you want to see what a founder is actually working with before you ask them for anything, the runway calculator takes about four minutes and doesn't ask for an email.
Raising within two quarters. CRV's three-month lead time is the right instinct. Here's the sharper version: the model has to survive a question about last quarter, not next year. Everybody's forecast is defensible. Almost nobody's historicals tie.
Illustrative scenario, not a client. Two seed companies. Same $1.8M ARR, same $180K monthly burn, both raising a Series A in the spring.
Company A reforecasts monthly. When actuals land, someone updates the model, writes down why the variance happened, and carries it forward. The forecast is wrong every month — all forecasts are — but it's wrong in a documented, explainable direction.
Company B rebuilds the model the week diligence opens. It looks great. Then an associate asks why Q2 revenue came in at $410K when the April board deck projected $520K, and nobody at the company can answer, because the April number was never reconciled to anything. The founder says a deal slipped. The associate asks which deal. The founder doesn't have it in front of him.
Nothing about Company B's business is worse than Company A's. The entire delta is credibility, and it shows up in the price, in the terms, or in the four extra weeks the round takes. That's the cost of problem three, and it never appears as a line item.
This is the case nobody writes about. You like the team, the market is right, and the numbers are unusable — not fraudulent, just incoherent. Cash and accrual mixed. Revenue recognized on invoice date. A cap table living in three versions of one spreadsheet.
The default is to pass, or to spend six weeks of associate time reconstructing a company's history.
There's a third option: tell them to come back when the numbers tie. Our Cash Clarity Sprint is three weeks and starts at $3,000 — the founder pays it, not you, and it's inexpensive relative to what they're asking you for. You keep the deal alive instead of passing on it, and you learn something diligence won't tell you: how a founder responds when handed a specific, finite, unglamorous piece of work. Some come back in three weeks with the model. Some don't come back. Both answers are useful before you wire money.
Referring a vendor costs you something if it goes wrong. So here's the boundary in plain terms.
We are not a CPA firm. No tax, no audit, no attest. We don't touch the company's relationship with its accountant, and we don't want to. That's a feature: the CPA stays, we operate the finance function between filings, and nobody's scope collides.
We are not the company's eventual in-house finance team. Where that line sits depends on the company — its complexity, how continuous the work has become, whether a full-time seat is justified yet — so we don't publish a revenue threshold and pretend it's a rule. What we will do is say out loud when we think the work belongs inside, document what we built, and hand it over.
Prices are public. Tiers and scoped projects are all on the pricing page. You can tell a founder what something costs before you introduce anyone, which is the actual reason most referrals never happen.
Everything here is free and none of it asks for an email. That's deliberate — a referral that turns into a lead-capture form makes you look bad, not us.
We keep a two-page diligence-readiness checklist built for exactly this. It's deliberately not a document list — your associates already send one of those. It's the shorter list of things that have to be true about a company before a document list is worth filling out, ending in four questions a founder should be able to answer out loud. Download it here — no email, no form. If you'd like a version with your firm's logo on it to forward, ask us and we'll send one.
Beyond that: the runway and burn calculators for the founder who can't tell you their runway on a call, and the Cap Table & Raise Model for the one whose dilution math is wrong. Both live on the tools page, along with the Financial Clarity Model — a 12-month P&L, three-scenario cash flow, and hiring plan in one workbook.
And if you'd rather just forward something to read: what a fractional CFO actually does is for the founder who doesn't know what they're buying. What lenders and investors actually look at is for the one heading into diligence. How to calculate your real runway is for everybody. And why your month-end close takes so long is for the company that keeps missing day 15.
And if you'd like to see how referrals work before you send anyone — including what we'll tell a founder we can't help with, and the fact that we don't pay or accept referral fees in either direction — it's all on the partners page. Or just email me directly. No form, no partner tier.