Plan three
Advanced Bookkeeping
Everything in Basic and Intermediate, plus the work a chief financial officer would do. Bookkeeping tells you where you have been. This is about where you are going, and whether the plan in your head survives contact with your actual numbers.
Built on everything below it
Forward-looking work is only as good as the records underneath it, so Advanced includes the whole foundation. Nothing is traded away to make room for the strategy.
- Weekly bank feed monitoring
- Monthly bank reconciliations
- Monthly financial statements
- Weekly accounts payable runs
- Payroll processing
Basic Bookkeeping in detail Intermediate Bookkeeping in detail
What Advanced adds
The shift here is from recording what happened to deciding what to do next. Same numbers, different question.
Outsourced CFO support
A bookkeeper tells you what the numbers are. A chief financial officer tells you what they mean and what to do about them. Advanced gives you the second thing without putting a senior finance salary on your payroll.
In practice that means having someone to think through the decisions that are too big to guess at. Whether your pricing actually covers what delivery costs you. Whether the business can carry another hire, and at what point it can. Whether taking on debt makes sense or just moves the problem. Which customers, jobs, or service lines are genuinely profitable once you account for the time they eat, because the busiest part of a business is very often not the most profitable part.
What this saves you: making a six-figure decision on instinct because the person who could have modeled it was not on the team.
Budgeting and forecasting
A budget is a plan with numbers attached. A forecast is a projection of where current trends actually lead. You need both, and they do different jobs.
The budget becomes useful the moment you start measuring against it, because the gap between what you planned and what happened is where the real information lives. A category running consistently over is telling you something either about your costs or about the assumptions you built the plan on. The forecast does the opposite job: it looks forward, and cash flow forecasting in particular is what turns a crisis into a manageable problem. A cash shortfall you can see three months out has solutions. The same shortfall discovered the week payroll is due has very few.
What this saves you: discovering a cash problem at the point where your only remaining options are expensive ones.
Growth modeling
We build out scenarios so you can see where the business is likely to sit in future years, and what would have to be true to get there.
This is where a plan gets tested before it costs anything. What happens to margins if you hire two people in the spring. What an eight percent price increase does to profit if it costs you some volume. What the business looks like if your largest client leaves, and whether that is survivable or existential. Running those on paper first is considerably cheaper than running them for real and finding out.
What this saves you: committing real money to a plan nobody stress tested.
Advanced is probably right if
- You are weighing a hire, an expansion, or a loan this year
- You do not know which parts of the business are actually profitable
- Cash feels tight in ways the profit and loss does not explain
- You are planning around a number you are not confident in
- You need a budget you can hold the business to, not a guess
- A lender or investor has asked for projections
- You want the advisory conversation, not just the reports
You probably do not need this yet if
- Your books are not reliable yet. Fix that first, or the forecasts are built on sand. Start with Basic.
- The business is steady and you are not planning a major move. Accurate monthly reporting may be all you need.
- What you actually want is the admin off your plate rather than strategy. That is Intermediate.
- You have prior periods to sort out. Cleanup comes before anything forward-looking. Ask about cleanup.
We would rather put you on the plan you need than the largest one you would agree to. Forward-looking work on unreliable records produces confident answers that happen to be wrong, which is worse than no answer at all.
Questions about Advanced Bookkeeping
What does an outsourced CFO actually do?
A chief financial officer is responsible for the financial strategy of a business rather than its record keeping. That covers planning and budgeting, cash flow management, pricing and margin analysis, evaluating major decisions such as hiring or borrowing, and preparing the projections lenders and investors ask for. Outsourced means you get that function on a part-time basis from outside the business, which is how most small companies access it, since a full-time CFO salary is out of reach long before the need for the role is.
What is the difference between a budget and a forecast?
A budget is what you intend to happen, set in advance and used as a benchmark. A forecast is what is likely to happen based on current trends and assumptions, updated as reality changes. A budget is how you hold the business to a plan. A forecast is how you see problems and opportunities coming. Comparing the two as the year progresses is where most of the useful information appears.
Do I need this if I already work with a CPA?
They do different jobs and generally work well together. Most CPAs engage around compliance and tax, looking primarily at what already happened so it can be reported correctly. CFO-level work is forward-looking and continuous: planning, modeling, and weighing decisions before they are made. One useful way to think about it is that your CPA keeps you compliant with the past while a CFO helps you decide about the future.
Why does this require the bookkeeping underneath it?
Because every forecast, budget, and model is built from your historical numbers. If the underlying records are incomplete or miscategorized, the projections will be internally consistent and still wrong, which is a worse position than not having them, because wrong numbers get acted on with confidence. That is why Advanced includes the full bookkeeping foundation rather than sitting on top of whatever records happen to exist.
Is my business too small for CFO support?
Smaller than you might think is still worth it, because the decisions that benefit most from modeling tend to arrive early. First hire, first lease, first real price increase, first loan. Those are exactly the choices where a small business has the least margin for error. That said, if the business is steady and you are not planning a significant move, monthly reporting may genuinely be enough, and we will tell you so.
Bring us the decision you are stuck on
Whether it is a hire, a price change, a loan, or just a number you do not trust, that is the conversation worth having first. Tell us what you are weighing and we will tell you what it would take to answer it properly, and whether Advanced is the right plan to get you there.