The four roles, plainly
A bookkeeper is the person who records transactions: categorizes the bank feed, enters bills, sends invoices, reconciles the accounts. It is the foundation of everything else, and the thing most often six weeks behind.
A controller is the person who makes sure the bookkeeping is right and turns it into a closed month: accruals, depreciation, intercompany entries, a balance sheet that balances for a reason, and a P&L you can hand to a bank. At 25 to 50 staff this is usually a fractional role, or something the outside CPA firm does once a year.
A fractional CFO is a finance executive who works for several companies at once, a few days a month each. The job is decisions: pricing, borrowing, hiring, which of your companies deserves the next dollar, what the bank will say. A CFO cannot do that from bad books, which is why the order of hiring matters.
An AI CFO is software that connects to your accounting file, computes the numbers a CFO would put in front of you, and answers questions about them in plain language. The category is new. The name flatters it. It replaces the reporting and much of the analysis, and does not replace the judgment or the person who tells you something you do not want to hear.
What each costs
The ranges below come from published guides, all vendor-written, so each has a reason to make its own service look reasonable. They agree more than you would expect.
| Role | Monthly cost | Source and date |
|---|---|---|
| Bookkeeper, outsourced | $500 to $2,000 | Eightx, June 2026 |
| Bookkeeper, in-house | $5,800 to $8,300 ($70,000 to $100,000 a year, fully loaded) | Indinero, July 2026 |
| Controller, fractional | $2,500 to $7,000 | Eightx, June 2026 |
| Fractional CFO, under $5M revenue | $3,000 to $5,000 | Eightx, June 2026 |
| Fractional CFO, $5M to $20M revenue | $5,000 to $10,000 | Eightx, June 2026 |
| Fractional CFO, all sizes | $3,000 to $12,000; most often $5,000 to $8,000 | Pilot, August 2025 |
| Full-time CFO | $16,300 to $26,800, base salary divided by twelve ($195,500 to $321,750 a year) | Bennett Financials |
| AI CFO software | $200 to $2,000 | CentSight |
Robert Half's 2026 salary guide puts a full-charge bookkeeper at $63,000 to $82,500 before benefits and payroll tax, which is how Indinero gets to $70,000 to $100,000 loaded. Bennett puts a full-time CFO's total cost at $350,000 to $500,000. Hourly fractional CFO work runs $150 to $500, per Eightx.
Three companies, 38 staff, $6,240,000 in combined revenue. An outsourced bookkeeper across three QuickBooks files at $1,850 a month is $22,200 a year. A fractional controller at $3,500 a month is $42,000. A fractional CFO at $6,500 a month is $78,000. All three together is $142,200 a year, or 2.3 percent of revenue, for a finance function that still meets once a month. Software at $600 a month is $7,200. The useful question is which lines you can drop, and which you were never going to get value from at this size.
What a CFO does in the 26 days between calls
The monthly call is the visible part. The CFO Accelerator, which trains fractional CFOs, published a suggested agenda in November 2025: five minutes of check-in, ten to twelve on the numbers, forty on decisions, five on next steps. Their line to the CFOs they train is that your clients are not paying you to read them the P&L. If your monthly call is forty minutes of P&L reading, you are paying CFO rates for a controller's summary.
The other 26 days are where the value should be, and where it is hardest to see. A good fractional CFO spends them building the 13-week cash forecast, watching covenant headroom, preparing the lender package before the bank asks, rerunning the budget when a contract slips, and noticing that one of your three companies has been quietly funding another. A mediocre one shows up with last month's P&L and a look of concern.
To tell the difference, ask what changed in the numbers since the last call, before the call. If the answer is ready and specific, the 26 days were used. If it arrives on the call, they were not.
What software covers, and what it does not
Software covers the recurring, computable part of the job, and does it every day rather than once a month. Consolidated and per-company P&L, cash by account, AR and AP aging, margin by line, a variance against budget with the reason attached, a rolling forecast, coverage against your loan terms. That is most of what an owner sees from a CFO in a month, and the part the CFO would rather not do by hand.
The cheapest version is ChatGPT with a pasted P&L. It costs the price of a consumer subscription and gives a different answer each time you ask, for reasons laid out in why ChatGPT gives different answers to the same question. The Intuit version is QuickBooks Advanced, $340 a month list since 1 August 2026, with 25 AI questions a month included and a single company per file. Purpose-built tools sit between those two; the spread in CentSight's $200 to $2,000 range mostly reflects how many entities they handle.
What no software does: negotiate with your bank, sit across from your partner when you disagree about the next hire, tell you the expansion is a mistake, or call the customer who is 90 days late. It cannot fix the bookkeeping it reads. A tool that computes gross margin the same way every day from a ledger six weeks behind gives you a precise, stale number.
When you need a CFO, honestly
Bennett Financials puts the fractional sweet spot at $1 million to $20 million in revenue and the full-time threshold at $15 million to $20 million, or sooner with multi-entity complexity. Most fractional CFO firms say something similar, and they are describing their own market.
We would put it differently. At 25 to 50 staff, the first hire is whoever gets the books closed within ten days of month end, because nothing else works without that. The second is a way to see all your companies together every morning rather than one at a time six weeks later, which we cover in how to manage the finances of several businesses without a spreadsheet. A CFO comes third, and comes sooner if any of these is true: a lender with covenants you have to report on, a purchase or sale of a business in the next year, real intercompany activity between your entities, or a decision in front of you where being wrong costs more than a year of the CFO's fees.
Most owners are doing this alone. TD Bank's March 2025 Wakefield survey of 250 owners found 66 percent were the sole person responsible for the company's finances and only 36 percent reviewed them monthly. QuickBooks' 2026 Business Owner Report of 1,305 owners found 37 percent trusting a human expert over AI alone, 20 percent the reverse, and 34 percent trusting both equally, which is roughly the mix we see too.
The hybrid, and why firms quote per entity
The hybrid is software that does the daily computing with a named CFO on top of it, so the human's hours go to decisions rather than to reporting. A CFO who spends the month building spreadsheets is a controller with a better title.
This is how the tiers on Navigator's pricing page are laid out. Navigator at $299 a month for the first entity gives the consolidated and per-entity view, cash, margin, aging and a morning brief, with the AI included. Navigator Pro at $499 adds budget against actual with the variance explained, the 13-week and rolling 12-month forecasts, breakeven and coverage against your own loan terms, and intercompany elimination. Navigator + CFO at $2,499 is where a person first enters: a named CFO on a monthly call and in Slack or Teams, packs assembled and sent for you, and covenant monitoring against your loan terms. Every additional entity is half price, so the three-company owner above pays $998 a month on Pro or $4,998 with the CFO, against $78,000 a year for the fractional CFO alone.
Per-entity pricing is how most firms and tools quote, and the reason is honest: each company is a separate file, a separate close, its own intercompany entries to reconcile, and often a separate lender. The work scales with entities, not revenue. If your comparison is against Intuit's own tools instead, QuickBooks Advanced against Intuit Enterprise Suite for a two-to-ten-entity owner is worth reading first, since Intuit prices the multi-entity product by contract rather than by entity.
Questions owners ask
How much does a fractional CFO cost per month?
Pilot's August 2025 guide puts the range at $3,000 to $12,000 a month, with most engagements at $5,000 to $8,000. Eightx's June 2026 guide narrows it by size: $3,000 to $5,000 a month under $5 million in revenue, $5,000 to $10,000 between $5 million and $20 million, or $150 to $500 an hour. Firms with several entities pay toward the top.
What is the difference between a fractional CFO and a controller?
A controller makes sure the books are right and closes the month: reconciliations, accruals, a P&L you can rely on. A CFO uses those books to decide what to do: pricing, borrowing, hiring, which company to fund. If the close is late or the numbers are wrong, the controller is the gap, and a CFO on top of it is mostly paying for someone to wait.
Do I need a CFO at $5M revenue?
Usually not a full one. Bennett Financials puts the fractional sweet spot at $1 million to $20 million and full-time at $15 million to $20 million, or earlier with multi-entity complexity. At $5 million what most owners lack is a clean monthly picture and a plan against it. Get those first; a CFO working from stale books is an expensive way to find that out.
What is an AI CFO?
Software that reads your accounting file and answers questions about it in plain language, typically $200 to $2,000 a month according to CentSight's comparison. It replaces the reporting and much of the analysis a CFO would prepare. It does not replace judgment, a relationship with your bank, or the person who tells you something you do not want to hear.
When should I move from fractional to full-time?
When the CFO work fills a week rather than a few days a month: a lender relationship that needs constant attention, an acquisition, several entities with real intercompany activity, or revenue past about $15 million to $20 million. A full-time CFO's base salary runs $195,500 to $321,750 per Bennett Financials, so the work has to justify it.
Related
If the problem underneath is several companies with no view across them, start with how to manage the finances of several businesses without a spreadsheet. For the Intuit route and what it costs at your size, read QuickBooks Advanced, Intuit Enterprise Suite, or a reporting layer. And before trusting any AI, including ours, with a number, see why ChatGPT gives different answers to the same question.
If you want to see what the software layer covers before deciding on the human one, the 30-day trial connects to QuickBooks read-only and needs no card: navigatorhq.ai.
Published . Last updated . Reviewed by a CFO on the Navigator team.