Bookkeeper, fractional CFO or a full-time hire? A straight answer.
Five different roles get lumped together under "we need someone for finance." They do genuinely different jobs at genuinely different prices, and founders regularly buy the wrong one.
The five roles, in order of scope
Bookkeeper
Records what already happened. Categorizes transactions, reconciles the bank, keeps the ledger tidy. Typically $500 to $2,000 a month depending on transaction volume.
A good bookkeeper is necessary and not sufficient. They will not tell you your runway is short, build you a forecast, or notice that your software spend jumped 30% and ask why.
Outsourced accounting firm or controller
Closes your books on a schedule and hands you a P&L and balance sheet. Usually $2,000 to $6,000 a month at early-stage volumes. Some of them handle payroll and sales tax filings too.
This is a real upgrade over a solo bookkeeper. It is still backward-looking. You get an accurate picture of last month. You do not get someone thinking about next year.
Fractional CFO
Forward-looking finance. Financial model, scenario planning, board reporting, fundraise support, unit economics. Commonly $5,000 to $15,000 a month depending on hours and scope.
The thing to check before hiring one is whether they do the work or advise on it. Plenty of fractional CFOs will build you a model and review your numbers, but will not go clean up the chart of accounts that made those numbers wrong in the first place. At Seed stage, the cleanup is usually the actual job.
Fractional finance and operations lead
This is what I do, and it exists because at early stage the finance problems and the ops problems are the same problem. Your burn is wrong partly because your books are wrong and partly because nobody owns the vendor stack. Your hiring plan isn't in the model because there is no hiring plan.
So the scope covers both. Books, close, budget vs. actuals, cash and runway dashboards, AR and AP on one side. Hiring plans, review cycles, vendor management and the internal processes that keep a growing team moving on the other. Typically $8,000 to $20,000 a month, which sounds like a lot until you price two separate people.
Full-time finance hire
A Head of Finance or VP Finance runs $180,000 to $300,000 plus equity, plus recruiting time, plus the risk of hiring the wrong level. A true CFO is more.
Worth it when the volume of work genuinely fills a week, when you have a team reporting into the role, or when a board seat expects a named executive. Not worth it before that, because you will pay a full-time salary for a job that is currently 15 hours a week.
How to tell which one you need
Skip the org chart question and answer these instead.
Can you pull up current burn and runway right now, without asking anyone? If no, you need someone building the system, not someone recording transactions. That's the fractional lead answer.
Are your books current and correct, and you just want a forecast? That's a fractional CFO. You already have the foundation.
Are your books a mess and you have no forecast at all? A fractional CFO will build a model on bad data. Fix the data first, or hire someone who does both.
Is the finance work under ten hours a week and purely transactional? A bookkeeper plus a close service will cover you for now. Revisit when you raise.
Do you have people, vendors, contracts and a hiring plan all falling to the founder? That's an ops problem sitting next to a finance problem, and hiring only for finance will leave half of it on your plate.
Does the role have direct reports and a full week of work? Hire full-time. Fractional is the wrong shape for a job that big.
The mistake I see most
A founder hires a bookkeeper, feels covered, and then discovers eighteen months later that nobody was ever looking forward. The books were technically correct the whole time. The company still made three expensive decisions on a runway number that was two months optimistic.
Recording the past and planning the future are separate jobs. Buying the first one does not get you the second.
The second most common mistake is hiring a full-time finance person too early. It's an expensive way to find out the job was 15 hours a week, and it's harder to unwind than a fractional engagement.
What most Seed companies actually need
Someone senior, part-time, who will do the work rather than advise on it. Fix the books, build the dashboard, run the monthly review, then set up the ops processes so it keeps running. Six to twelve months of that and you have a system a future full-time hire can inherit instead of rebuild.
That's the whole idea behind building it to hand off. The goal isn't to be there forever. It's to leave behind something that works without you.
Quick answers.
How much does a fractional CFO cost?
Commonly $5,000 to $15,000 a month for finance-only scope, and $8,000 to $20,000 for a combined finance and operations scope. Most work on a flat monthly retainer sized to the engagement rather than hourly, which matters because hourly billing gives your finance person a reason not to automate anything.
When should a startup hire its first finance person?
Usually around the Seed round, once there's payroll, a real vendor stack and investors who want reporting. Before that a bookkeeper plus a close service is enough. The trigger isn't revenue, it's whether the founder can still answer the runway question with confidence.
Can one person really cover both finance and operations?
At Seed to Series B scale, yes, and AI is why the math works now. Categorization review, dashboard refreshes, variance drafting and process automation used to be most of the week. When those run automatically, one senior person has room for both functions. Past Series B the volume usually splits the role.
What should I ask a fractional CFO before hiring them?
Ask whether they'll fix your chart of accounts or just report off it. Ask what they hand you in the first month. Ask how the work continues after the engagement ends. And ask what happens to your data and access when you part ways, because you should own every system they touch.