If you’re running a small business, a chief financial officer (CFO) can provide expert-level guidance for managing normal operating accounting while also helping you plan long-term strategy for growing the company. The CFO is generally the third-highest ranking executive in a company and, as such, one of the highest paid. Many entrepreneurs simply don’t have the budget to invest in hiring a senior executive.
Outsourcing oversight of your company’s financial management to Financial Optics gives you the benefits of having an expert virtual CFO on your team without the costs of adding a full-time position. We provide accountants and advisors with decades of experience to give small-business owners on-demand financial advice, expert bookkeeping, and long-term planning strategies so you can focus on what you do best: Running your company.
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What Does a Virtual CFO Bring to the Table?
A CFO is typically a trained, highly experienced accountant who has risen to supervisor of the entire company’s finances, overseeing the accounting staff, and more important, working with you to align big-picture business goals with financial strategies.
By outsourcing the CFO role to Financial Optics, you get access to our decades of expertise without needing to provide an office, desk, salary, stock options, vacation pay, et cetera.
The role of CFO has evolved rapidly with the advent of modern communications and technology and, more recently, with the pandemic and its global ripples that have changed the way we all do business.
Traditionally, a CFO is in charge of the company’s assets, by ensuring the books are accurate and your knowledge of the company’s finances and forecasts is accurate so that you can make smart, informed decisions. These duties include being responsible for overseeing money coming in and going out, such as paying vendors, taxes, and other expenses, overseeing payroll, billing clients, and supervising how revenues are handled within the company. A CFO is the money police in every way, and that makes them your best friend.
Yet, more and more today, the CFO plays a more prominent role in determining the forward-looking vision for a company. They can help you explain value to potential investors or clients, locate opportunities, and use their extensive knowledge of your company’s finances to help you make plans and chart a path to smart, responsible growth.
A vitally important value of a CFO is helping small businesses identify problem areas or potential disruptions and then derive a method for focusing on them, covering all topics from employee overtime to looming expenses. The CFO can also point out challenges you need to address so you are able to stay on track to meet your goals and compliances.
This is the fiscal leadership Financial Optics provides you: using the power of your company’s existing and potential financial health to plan and support long-term strategy and investments. This leads to achieving the objectives and financial performance you’ve identified as priorities.
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Virtual CFO Services: Lowering Risk, Raising Capabilities
An experienced CFO can help you reduce costs, ensure compliance with taxes and reporting, and more. This greatly lowers your risk of a costly clerical error. Often, a growing company requires more advanced financial management than an in-house accountant or bookkeeper can provide. Yet, many small businesses do not have enough work to keep a CFO busy full-time, nor the budget to cover this highly compensated position. With Financial Optics, you pay for only the CFO services you need – while also making certain your company receives reliable financial management from subject-matter experts.
Put another way, Financial Optics offers you more than simple bookkeeping or accounting – we give you insights into the financial health of your company and advice. And smart advice from a financial expert is a powerful tool for any entrepreneur. An important part of that advice is helping you identify value drivers of your business, which can be made measurable to increase the value of your company. This allows you to chart a path forward to increase cash flow, reallocate resources to the most profitable areas, eliminate less-profitable areas, position the company for acquisition or attract investment capital for growth, and more.
By outsourcing your high-level financial management with a virtual CFO from Financial Optics, you lower your risks by ensuring rock-solid routine accounting and expand your capabilities with an expert financial advisor for strategic planning.
Independence
A full-time CFO is, as mentioned above, a senior executive with a high degree of authority. That means this individual would share management of your company with you. But a virtual CFO is not in your office and does not have the same management authority a permanent hire would. To be blunt, a virtual CFO helps you avoid inviting in a competing voice at the upper level of your company and allows you to remain in full authority as the decisionmaker and principal visionary.
Furthermore, because a virtual CFO is not a full-time hire, with all the contractual complications that may involve, you can simply make a change if you don’t feel it’s a good fit. A virtual CFO is essentially a subcontractor, and you can quickly and easily change subcontractors if you’re ever dissatisfied with the quality of our work.
At Financial Optics, we are dedicated to the values of integrity, service, entrepreneurship, teamwork, and confidentiality. We work hard to gain your trust by delivering the highest quality of financial services and acting with the highest degree of professional ethics. We want you to feel confident in your decision to partner with us, so we provide full transparency into everything we do for you – and a guarantee of our work. The peace of mind we provide you together with our virtual relationship ensures your independence as a business owner.
Day-to-Day Accounting
Financial Optics can help your team improve cashflow protocols, better manage revenues to increase profitability, and produce more accurate, more reliable financial statements. Further, Financial Optics works with your accounting staff to ensure your company’s books are always in balance and free of potentially costly errors.
We use state-of-the-art automated systems and models to keep financial records orderly, and we adhere to processes for multiple redundancies that significantly increase accuracies. We can even provide QuickBooks help. Whether you need financial management for a short-term project or on a long-term basis, our team brings your team decades of business-operations accounting experience. And we deliver the high-level, supervisory viewpoint to oversee or perform your day-to-day accounting, from payroll to ledger maintenance to accounts payable/receivable.
Together, our potent combination of expertise in daily accounting and growth-oriented financial insight makes a virtual CFO from Financial Optics one of the best business decisions you’ll ever make. And just to be clear, the term “virtual” simply means we won’t be physically in your office. Your Financial Optics CFO is very much a real person, thoroughly trained in accounting and with extensive experience working together with owner-managed businesses like yours.
Ready? Set? Go!
Ready to talk about what a Financial Optics virtual CFO can do for your company? Get in touch with us here. We can’t wait to hear about your business.