They each play an important and distinct role, and the mistake most founders make is expecting one to do the job of all three.

Your bookkeeper keeps the records – transactions, invoices, reconciliations.

Your accountant works with those records to handle compliance, tax returns, and year-end reporting.
Both of those functions look backwards.

A fractional CFO looks forward. We work with the outputs of your bookkeeper and accountant and turn them into insight and strategy. We’re asking questions like: are your margins actually healthy, or just your revenue? Do you have enough runway to make that hire? What does your business need to look like to be fundable, saleable, or scalable? That’s the layer most founder-led businesses are missing – and it’s often the most commercially important one.

Absolutely – in fact, this is one of the most common scenarios we work in. Having a bookkeeper, an accounts manager, or even a financial controller doesn’t mean you have strategic finance covered. Those roles typically focus on execution. A fractional CFO brings the strategic layer above them.

We’ll work alongside your existing team, support their development, and make sure the right information is getting to you at the right time in the right format. Often, a fractional CFO can actually make your internal finance team significantly more effective – because they understand what good looks like and can help build the systems, processes, and reporting frameworks that let your team do their best work.

Honestly? These terms are often used to describe the same thing, and the industry hasn’t settled on one consistent definition. We’ve called ourselves a variety of things over the years – virtual, outsourced, fractional – and fractional is the term that most closely describes how we actually work and think about our role.

The most meaningful distinction isn’t in the label, it’s in what’s actually being delivered. A true fractional CFO is embedded in the business, present in management meetings, and operating as a genuine member of your leadership team – just part-time.

If someone is offering “CFO services” but only showing up to produce a monthly report and then disappearing, that’s quite different regardless of what they call it. When you’re evaluating any provider, look beyond the headline and ask exactly what the support looks like in practice.

We work with founder-led businesses that are typically in that growth stage – what we affectionately call the messy middle. In revenue terms, that’s broadly businesses turning over $2M to $50M, though the more important indicator is whether a business is navigating real complexity: scaling a team, managing tighter margins, preparing for a capital raise, thinking about succession, or heading toward a sale.

We skew more toward the scale-up stage than early startup, though we do work with earlier-stage businesses on specific projects – particularly around capital raising or strategy. And we also work with mature, stable businesses that simply want to run a tighter financial function without the cost of a full-time CFO. If you’re a founder who’s starting to feel like the business has outgrown the financial infrastructure underneath it, you’re probably in the right place.

There are a few telling signs. You’re making significant decisions – on hiring, pricing, investment, or growth – and you’re not fully confident the numbers are backing them up. You feel like you’re flying blind between your accountant’s year-end report and the next one. Your revenue is growing but your cash position doesn’t seem to reflect that. You’re being asked questions by a bank, an investor, or a potential acquirer and you’re not sure you can answer them well.

The honest truth is that most founders come to us a little later than they should. A fractional CFO isn’t the reward for scaling – it’s often part of the fuel that gets you there. If you’re wondering whether you’re ready, that’s usually a pretty good sign that you are.

We work across a genuinely diverse range of industries – from tech startups and SaaS businesses to construction, professional services, manufacturing, retail, and family businesses across multiple generations. Finance fundamentals travel well across industries, and the strategic questions founders face – around growth, cash flow, margins, and exit – tend to be more similar than different regardless of sector.

What matters more to us than your industry is your stage and your ambition. If you’re a founder navigating complexity and you want a genuine financial thought partner in your corner, we’re interested in talking.

Pricing varies depending on the scope and frequency of the engagement, and we think that’s how it should be – a business that needs half a day a week of CFO support is in a very different place from one that needs two to three days. We work predominantly on a retainer model, with a set number of days allocated per week or per month, so you get consistency and we can genuinely embed in your business.

The most useful way to think about cost is relative to the alternative. A full-time senior CFO in Australia costs upwards of $250,000 a year in salary alone, before super, leave, and all the overhead that comes with a C-suite employee. With a fractional arrangement, you’re accessing that same calibre of experience and thinking for the portion of time you actually need. The starting point is always a conversation to understand what your business needs – that’s what our Initial Financial Health Check is designed to help us work out together.

It’s rarely one big thing – it’s usually a combination of decisions made better, risks caught earlier, and opportunities pursued with more confidence. We’ve helped founders identify that their most profitable revenue line wasn’t what they thought it was. We’ve helped businesses avoid a capital raise they didn’t actually need by fixing their cash flow cycle first. We’ve helped founders get a business sale-ready in a way that materially increased the value they walked away with.

The cleaner version: if working with us helps you make one better decision – on pricing, on hiring, on timing a sale – the investment pays for itself. Most of our clients see that happen well within the first year.

The first step is a conversation. We don’t believe in proposing a solution before we understand your business, so we start with a proper discovery conversation to get a sense of where you are, what you’re navigating, and what kind of support would actually be useful.

From there, we start with our Initial Financial Health Check – a structured diagnostic that gives you a clear picture of where your finance function is today and what it needs to look like to support where you want to go. It’s a practical, no-jargon starting point that gives us both a solid foundation.

Reach out via our website or email Michelle directly – we’ll take it from there.

The Financial Health Check is a diagnostic tool we developed to give founders a clear, honest picture of the health of their finance function – not just today, but in terms of how well it’s set up for where they want the business to go.

We look at five key areas: your financial planning process and whether it’s actually aligned to your strategic goals; your reporting and whether it tells you the true story of your numbers; your finance systems and whether your data is reliable and consistent; your processes and whether they’re standardised and as automated as they should be; and your financial support structure – whether the right people are in the right roles for the life stage of the business.

You’ll come out of it with a report covering the risks and opportunities we’ve identified, and a recommended roadmap for addressing them. If you’re not sure what good looks like in your finance function – or if you’ve had a nagging feeling that something isn’t quite right – this is a very good place to start.

A Sales Readiness Assessment is for founders who are thinking about selling their business – whether that’s in six months or a few years away. The window between “thinking about it” and “doing something about it” is where most of the value is either built or lost, and this assessment is designed to make sure you’re in the first category.

We look at your financials through the lens of a buyer or an adviser – identifying the things that would raise questions, reduce your valuation, or complicate a transaction. That covers the numbers themselves, but also your financial processes, reporting quality, business dependencies, and how well the business can operate without you front and centre. You’ll come away with a clear picture of where you stand and a practical roadmap for what to address before you go to market. Getting this right early makes a real difference to the outcome.

It depends on your stage and what’s most pressing, but in practice you can expect your fractional CFO to be across financial planning and forecasting; cash flow management and working capital; management reporting and board packs; pricing and margin analysis; scenario modelling for key decisions; support with capital raising or banking relationships; budget development and tracking; and keeping a close eye on the KPIs that actually matter for your specific business model.

What it doesn’t include is bookkeeping, payroll, or tax compliance – those sit with your bookkeeper and accountant. Our role is the strategic layer above that, making sure you’re not just recording what’s happened but actively using your financial information to make better decisions.

For most of our engagements, the range sits between half a day and three days per week. Where you sit within that range depends on the complexity of your business, what you’re navigating, and how much strategic finance input you actually need.

Below half a day a week, it becomes difficult for us to add the kind of value we want to add – we’re simply not across enough of what’s happening in the business. Above three days a week, the conversation usually shifts to whether it’s time to bring someone in-house. We’ll be honest with you about both ends of that range, and engagements can flex up or down as your needs change over time.

It varies significantly. We think about engagements as either a “brief affair” – working with a business through a specific project or life stage – or something much longer, more like a marriage. In practice, most of our ongoing engagements run for two to three years, though we have clients we’ve worked with for seven or eight years. We also work on specific shorter-term projects – around a capital raise, a business sale, or a transformation – where the engagement has a clearer endpoint.

What’s interesting is that we often spend the tail end of an engagement gently encouraging our clients that they’re ready for the next step – whether that’s bringing a CFO in-house or transitioning to a different structure. If we’ve done our job well, the business should outgrow the need for us in the way we started. That’s not a failure – that’s the goal.

Faster than you might expect – and that’s genuinely one of the advantages of working with experienced fractional resources. We’ve gone into businesses at different stages, in different industries, with different challenges, over and over again. That repetition builds a kind of pattern recognition that means we can identify what matters quickly and add value faster than a permanent hire who’s finding their feet for the first time.

That said, a good fractional CFO doesn’t just parachute in with assumptions. The onboarding period is about understanding your specific business, your numbers, your team, and the context behind all of it – not just the headlines. Most of our clients feel like we’re genuinely across their business within the first few months.

At Lantern Partners, one CFO works with one founder – we don’t operate as a rotating team. That relationship and continuity matters enormously to how effective the engagement can be. Your CFO becomes a trusted, embedded part of your leadership team.

In practice, that means being present in your management meetings and exec conversations – not just the finance conversations. It means regular reporting rhythms, structured check-ins, and being genuinely accessible when something comes up that needs a financial lens. It also means being willing to have honest, sometimes uncomfortable conversations when the numbers are telling a story the business needs to hear.

No. We work with clients remotely and have done so very successfully. The fractional model has always been built around flexibility, and geography isn’t a barrier to getting strong strategic finance support.

That said, relationship matters enormously in this kind of engagement, and we do find value in face-to-face time, particularly at the start of an engagement and at key moments through the year. The most important thing is that communication is open, trust is strong, and your CFO is genuinely embedded in the conversations that matter – whether that’s via video, in a boardroom, or a bit of both.