Fair warning: this week is a little more salesy than usual.

But I've had so many conversations lately with founders who don’t understand how CFO and accounting services are priced — how to evaluate a firm against another firm or a solo freelancer, and what the cost-benefit actually is — that I think it's worth it.

It's also why I rebuilt our entire sales deck this month.

There's been a theme with our clients this past year — everyone is rethinking their funnels, their websites, their product catalogs, their pricing. We're no different.

We're feeling the same impacts as everyone else.

And I had a hunch we'd been losing more deals to price. So I went back through the conversations behind the deals we lost and asked why we lost them, what I could have done better, and what I tell founders on those calls that never makes it into the deck.

The pricing explanation was at the top of the list. Every time.

A founder gets the deck, forwards it to a COO or a partner who was never on the call, and nothing in that document explains why we cost what we cost.

So I'm doing two things today. First, walking through exactly how I build our monthly service fees. Then showing you why the price is only half of any comparison you'll run, and where the other half lives.

A founder reached out this spring. She runs a games brand that did about $9M last year and is forecasting $16M this year, growing over 100% a year.

She was comparing us against one other option. We came in around $9,500 a month. They came in at $4,500, all in, including AP and AR.

She straight up asked me, "You guys are significantly higher cost, but I'm trying to understand why. Are you guys just better? Do you have better people on your team?"

This was her third time hiring a fractional CFO, and nobody had ever told her what she was buying.

Usually I'm not fully transparent about pricing. But I'm learning it's helpful when I talk to founders — and this time it gave us a much richer conversation about the services, what she was getting, and what she did and didn't want to do.

There are a lot of elements that go into a price.

It depends on the services — CFO work, accounting, bookkeeping, AP, AR. And the accounting scope depends on the complexity of the business. Not how many SKUs you have — but the structural complexity.

To help evaluate that, we run a full-scale, custom assessment of the accounting system. Usually that's QuickBooks, but we also evaluate Fulfil and NetSuite.

That assessment is part of how we actually price. It helps inform how many hours per month the work needs across the four people on an engagement team: a bookkeeper, a controller, a CFO, and a financial analyst.

From there the math is pretty simple:

That's the fee. There's nothing else in it.

Since it affects the cost and everyone wonders: all of our CFOs are American. About half of our controllers are American and the other half are Argentinian. All of our bookkeepers are in the Philippines.

Take her $4,500 all-in quote — bookkeeping, a controller, a CFO, and AP and AR — and be as generous as possible. Assume every dollar of it goes to a single CFO.

A competent ecommerce CFO retails between $200 and $300 an hour. That's the price you as a founder actually pay. So do the math real quick: $4,500 divided by $300 an hour is 15 hours a month. Total.

Do you think they're going to close the books in 10 hours or less?

I’m skeptical. But even if that's true, the remaining 5 hours have to cover everything else. If you're having a weekly meeting with your CFO, there's 4 hours of the month already — before the prep time and the follow-ups.

It's just really hard to imagine getting the quality of insight and attention you want from a bona fide CFO for $4,500 — let alone AP and AR and everything else on top.

So one of these is true. Somebody is working hours they didn't charge for. A junior person is sitting in a senior seat. The scope is thinner than it reads. Or the price goes up in month seven.

For reference, our accounting-only package for this particular client was $4,500 a month alone - before adding a CFO and a financial analyst.

I've had this conversation dozens of times this year with founders, and I'll say what I said to her: I don't understand how these other companies are able to charge $4,500 for all of that.

Yes, AI is helping costs go down. But we’re still a long way from the robots executing $500,000 payments to suppliers.

Here's the part that matters whether or not you're shopping.

The reason she was looking in the first place is that her supply chain team found $50,000 in 3PL overcharges. Her previous finance firm had audited that same 3PL and told her everything was fine.

She read that as her fractional CFO not caring.

Then she pulled up her scope document and read it to me out loud. Bookkeeping, monthly close, cash flow forecast, monthly reporting with commentary, marketing efficiency analysis.

Nowhere in it did it say audit my 3PL.

So nobody audited the 3PL. That $50,000 wasn't a competence problem or an attitude problem. It was never in the agreement.

A price only means something next to a scope. When one quote is $4,500 and another is $9,500, you are not looking at the same product at two prices. You're looking at two different amounts of work, and the scope document is the only place that difference is visible.

Which is why comparing the two numbers on their own tells you almost nothing.

If I were on your side of the table evaluating a finance partner, including evaluating us, this is what I'd want answered before signing. Works the same on a 3PL, an agency, or a law firm.

Pull your scope document and read the whole thing. Find the thing you've been assuming was covered. The 3PL audit. The quarterly tax payments. SKU-level margin.

If it isn't in there, it isn't happening, and that's not your provider being lazy.

Which is why the first decision isn't which quote to take.

It's getting clear on what you actually need this year, and what quality of work you want behind it. If a clean monthly close and a review call are all you need, buy that. It's a real product and it's usually relatively cheap.

You already run this math on your own products. You know what yours costs to make, and you know what the cheap version costs to make.

When a competitor shows up at half your price, you don't assume they found magic. You assume something came out.

The games founder from earlier ultimately went with the $4,500 option (bummer because she was awesome), and she told me straight up it came down to price.

I have a very sneaking suspicion that in about six months my phone rings: "You were right. We're not getting the value out of this, and we're ready to go with you."

Maybe I'm wrong. But I've watched this one play out enough times.

If you've never had the conversation she and I had — a transparent walk through what you're actually buying, hour by hour, seat by seat — I'm happy to have it with you. Even if the answer is that your current setup is great.

— Sam

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