Who This is for
The account looks healthy, so the hire is approved and the order is placed. Nobody has modelled what is committed against what is collectable, and the tight month arrives without warning.
Not just numbers — the reporting, the controls, the assumptions and someone who can explain them.
Turnover has multiplied, entities have been added, and financial management is still the founder in the evenings.
Twelve months of preparation is worth more than any amount of negotiation, and the work has to start before the process does.
A full-time CFO is a substantial fixed cost and, at your stage, an underused one.
Margin is falling and nobody can say why, or the profit reported bears no relationship to the cash observed — and there is no one senior reviewing the finance team’s work.
What's Included
How it Works
Diagnostic
What exists, what is reliable, and what is being decided without information. We review the books, the reporting, the controls, the cash position and the structure, and set out what is missing in a short written assessment.
Fix the foundation
Judgement applied to unreliable records produces confident bad decisions. If the books are not current or reconciled, that is addressed first as bookkeeping work, in its own scope — the honest sequence, and occasionally an unwelcome answer.
Establish the reporting
A defined monthly pack, on a fixed date, with the same measures each month. Comparability is what makes reporting useful; a report rebuilt differently each time is a document, not information.
Put controls in, and plan the cash
Authorisation limits, approval routes, the separation between owner and company — proportionate, because controls that are too heavy get bypassed, and a bypassed control is worse than none. Alongside them, a rolling forward cash plan: committed costs, contracted revenue, collection realities, tax and licence obligations, and the specific weeks where it will be tight.
Work to the event, on a recurring cadence
Where an audit, a facility, a raise or a sale is in prospect, the calendar runs backwards from it. Otherwise: a monthly review with you on the numbers and the decisions, a quarterly view on the forecast and the structure, and availability between the two.
What We Need from You
Most of this is a scan and an email — none of it needs to be perfect before we talk, and we tell you exactly what is missing after the first review.
Timeline and Cost
The diagnostic is a defined piece of work with a short turnaround. Everything after it depends on what it finds, and on whether the underlying records are usable. Meaningful change in reporting quality appears over the first few monthly cycles, because the value is in comparability and comparability takes months to accumulate. Preparation for a transaction should begin well before the counterparty is engaged; the least effective version of this work is the one commissioned after diligence has started.
Our fee is fixed and agreed in writing against a defined scope — entity count, reporting frequency, whether a transaction is in prospect, and the depth of oversight required — anchored to the work rather than to turnover or to the value of any transaction.
We do not take a percentage of funds raised or of a sale price.
Get a Fixed QuoteWhere it Goes Wrong
A forecast built on an unreconciled ledger is a confident number with nothing underneath it. The failure is invisible until a decision made on it turns out wrong, or an auditor tests the balances. Recording comes first, and there is no version of this work that skips it.
Profitable companies run out of money routinely, and the usual mechanism is collection: revenue is recognised, the customer pays late or partially, and committed costs do not wait. A profit and loss statement will not show this in time. Only forward cash planning will.
Owner drawings taken irregularly and undocumented, personal costs settled by the company. It distorts every reported margin, produces a shareholder balance that cannot be explained — and in a transaction it is read as a governance failure rather than an administrative one.
Once diligence is underway, every gap found is a price adjustment or a warranty. The historical information, the controls and the explanations should exist before the first meeting. This is the highest-value use of this function and the one most often left too late.
A monthly pack that restates the ledger without interpretation gets filed unopened. Controls fail the same way when they are designed for a bigger company: approval routes requiring three signatures in a nine-person business are bypassed within a month, and the bypass becomes the process.
Rate and relief interact with structure, timing and intra-group arrangements. Small Business Relief — an election to 0% for revenue up to AED 3,000,000 — is extended to tax periods ending on or before 31 December 2029 by Ministerial Decision No. 131, so a company relying on it should be planning for the position afterwards rather than discovering it at the next return. Free zone entities relying on the 0% qualifying rate face a continuing test, and the evidence for it is a reporting and controls question, not only a tax one.
Questions
How is this different from bookkeeping?
Bookkeeping records what happened. This function interprets it and decides what to do about it — reporting, controls, cash planning, and readiness for external scrutiny. They are sequential: the record has to be reliable before judgement applied to it is worth anything. Most companies need both, and we scope them separately so it is clear which you are buying.
Do we need this if we already have an accountant?
Possibly. An accountant produces compliant accounts; a CFO decides what the business does with them and whether the controls behind them hold. The test is whether anyone reviews the accountant’s work, owns the forecast, and can defend the numbers to a bank or an investor.
Will you sign as a director or an authorised signatory?
No. This is a service engagement, not an appointment. Decisions, authorisations and statutory responsibility remain with the company’s own directors and managers, which is also what keeps the advice independent.
Can you prepare us for a sale or a funding round?
Yes — historical financial information, the data room, and the assumptions behind the projections. We do not act as a broker, introduce buyers, or charge a percentage of anything raised or realised.
Can you tell us the company is not ready?
Yes, and it happens. Where the records will not support a diligence process, or a facility will not be approved on the current position, you hear that at assessment rather than after the money has been spent.