A Fractional CFO For Your Nonprofit

Working at strategy over coffee

When you hear about “fractional CFOs” you probably aren’t thinking about hiring one for your nonprofit. But, having a part-time Chief Financial Officer / Controller to advise your executive team could be the part that’s missing to help your nonprofit grow. Fractional CFOs are starting to become more common place, not just for large companies or start-ups, but for nonprofits to ensure fundraising efforts as well as accounting practices are strategic and stable. Here are a few reasons you might want to consider bringing a fractional CFO into your nonprofit.

A Fractional CFO Saves Your Executive Director Time

How often do you hear, or even say it yourself, “I just don’t have enough time to dig into the financials!” This is common in the for-profit world as well and could keep your business or nonprofit from growing. Regardless of size, understanding money coming in and going out is what keeps everything running. But, taking a deep dive to build a growth strategy or determine where issues with cash flow might be coming from could take days, if not weeks. Hiring a part-time CFO removes the burden from the executive director.

Hopefully, you’re not the executive director/accountant or have a volunteer doing finances. Where do you have time to get into the weeds and track data to help with forecasting? A fractional CFO / Offsite, part-time accountant can offer strategic financial planning. A fractional CFO can bring a different perspective to the numbers and be forward looking to help the team course correct, if needed, or create new goals in a growth or capital plan. This frees the Executive Director to focus on the broader organizational needs.

Fractional CFOs Save Money

Full-time workers with their salaries and benefits are usually the largest financial line items for any nonprofit. A fractional CFO/Accounting team removes a portion of that burden. Employees of your nonprofit should be focused on furthering your mission and while an on-staff accountant is certainly doing that, consider how much savings you’ll see hiring a part-time CFO/Accountant. That money can go to programs or hiring an employee focused on programs, marketing, or fundraising for your nonprofit.

There might be some worry that a part-time accountant only connects with you once a month to deliver financials, but that isn’t the case with N4N and other fractional accounting operations. We are connected to our nonprofit clients consistently even though we aren’t in the office daily. If you are looking to streamline your accounting system, work on cash flow maximization, or need to just save money- a fractional CFO is a perfect fit.

Fractional CFO’s Bring Experiences from Other Nonprofits

A fractional CFO/accounting team can immediately bring past experience and knowledge from other nonprofits into their relationship with your nonprofit. Since N4N accountants are working with several nonprofits at the same time, they can see trends that are affecting others or notice something that could occur with your nonprofit before it happens since it happened with another

Fractional CFOs offer flexibility as you grow or if you shrink and can help Executive Directors train new staff, as well as new board members, in times of turnover when it comes to budgeting and reading financials properly.

As your part-time, fractional accountant, Numbers 4 Nonprofits is focused on managing money with mission: Your nonprofit’s money.

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