BACK-OFFICE EXPERTS FOR GROWING BUSINESSES

Fractional CFO Services for Dallas/Fort Worth Businesses

There is a gap in most growing businesses between the person who records the numbers and the person who decides what to do about them. The bookkeeper closes the month. The CPA files the return. Nobody is sitting between those two answering the question the owner actually loses sleep over: what should we do next, and can we afford it?

That gap is what a fractional CFO fills. Hanson Ledgers provides fractional CFO services to businesses across the Dallas/Fort Worth metroplex, from Arlington and Fort Worth through Dallas, Grand Prairie, and Mansfield.

What a Fractional CFO Is

A fractional CFO is a senior finance professional engaged part-time. You get the forecasting, planning, and financial judgment a full-time CFO provides, on a monthly retainer sized to a business that does not need or cannot justify a six-figure executive hire.

The word fractional describes the time commitment, not the seniority. The work is the same work: building the model, running the forecast, pressure-testing the plan, and being in the room when significant financial decisions get made.

Bookkeeper, CPA, CFO: Who Does What

These three roles get conflated constantly, and the confusion is expensive because it leads owners to expect strategy from someone hired for compliance.

A bookkeeper records what happened. Transactions categorized, accounts reconciled, statements produced. Accurate, historical, essential, and the foundation everything else stands on. That is our Bookkeeping Support.

A CPA handles tax. Filing, compliance, tax strategy, and representation. Deep expertise, but generally engaged around deadlines rather than embedded in weekly operating decisions.

A fractional CFO looks forward. Forecasting cash, modelling scenarios, analyzing margin and pricing, planning hiring capacity, preparing the business for financing or sale. They consume what the bookkeeper produces and turn it into decisions.

The sequence matters. CFO work built on unreliable books produces confident nonsense, which is worse than no forecast at all because people act on it.

When a DFW Business Is Ready for One

The signals are fairly consistent:

• Revenue past roughly a million dollars, where the cost of a bad financial decision starts exceeding the cost of advice.
• Profitable on paper but tight on cash. The single most common reason owners call. Profit and cash are different things and the gap between them is where businesses fail.
• Preparing for a loan or investment. Lenders and investors expect projections, unit economics, and someone who can defend the numbers in a meeting.
• Planning significant hiring. Knowing what the business can carry, and at what revenue the next role pays for itself.
• Pricing decisions with real consequences. Margin analysis by service line, which frequently overturns assumptions owners have held for years.
• An acquisition, a partner buyout, or an exit. Any of which requires financial modelling well before the transaction.
• Growth that has stopped feeling controlled. Busier every quarter, with no clear sense of whether it is working.

What the Work Actually Involves

• Cash-flow forecasting. A rolling thirteen-week view of what is coming in and going out, so you see a squeeze weeks ahead rather than the morning payroll is due.
• Budgets and rolling forecasts. A plan for the year that gets revised as reality arrives, rather than a spreadsheet built in January and never opened again.
• Pricing and margin analysis. Which services and clients actually make money once delivery cost is counted honestly.
• KPI dashboards. A small number of measures that genuinely indicate health, reviewed on a schedule.
• Budget versus actuals. Not to assign blame, but to make the next forecast better.
• Hiring and capacity modelling. What the next hire costs fully loaded, and what has to be true for it to pay off.
• Financing and lender support. Projections and packages that survive underwriting scrutiny.
• Board-ready reporting. For businesses with partners, investors, or a board expecting a real financial narrative.
• Regular strategy sessions. Monthly, bi-weekly, or weekly depending on the package, with someone who knows your numbers before the call starts.

The Cost Comparison, Honestly

A full-time CFO in the Dallas/Fort Worth market commands a serious salary, and salary is only part of it. Add payroll taxes, benefits, bonus, equipment, and recruiting cost and the fully loaded figure climbs well past the headline number. For a business between one and ten million in revenue, that is usually indefensible.

Fractional CFO packages at Hanson Ledgers run from 1,500 dollars per month at the entry level to 4,000 dollars per month for the most involved engagement, with a bundled option combining monthly bookkeeping and CFO Lite. Full package detail sits on our Strategic Financial Guidance page.

The comparison people miss is not fractional versus full-time. It is fractional versus nothing, which is what most growing businesses actually have. The cost of no financial planning shows up as a bad hire carried too long, a price held two years past when it should have moved, or a cash crunch that forced expensive borrowing.

Why Books and CFO Work Belong Together

A common frustration with standalone fractional CFOs is that they arrive, find the books unreliable, and spend the first two months on cleanup at strategic-advisory rates.

Because Hanson Ledgers handles both, that does not happen. If your records need cleanup or catch-up, we do that as bookkeeping work at bookkeeping prices, then move into CFO work once the foundation is sound. The forecast is built on records maintained by the same team, so nobody is reconciling two versions of the truth.

One Team Across the Back Office

Financial strategy rarely stays purely financial. A hiring model runs into a capacity problem, which is an operations question. A margin analysis surfaces a manual process quietly consuming hours. Hanson Ledgers is built as a back-office team for that reason:

• Bookkeeping Support for clean books and reliable reporting.
• Administrative Support for inbox, calendar, and client communication.
• Operations support for workflows, projects, and team coordination.
• Technology support for cybersecurity, systems, and automation.

Heather Hanson leads bookkeeping, executive support, and business operations, and brings decades of financial and operational experience across multi-location businesses. Kevin Hanson leads technology. You can read about both on our about page.

Start With the Decision You Are Stuck On

The most useful first conversation is not abstract. It is about the specific decision in front of you: whether you can afford the hire, why cash is tight in a profitable year, what the business needs to look like before a lender will say yes.

The consultation is free. We will tell you honestly whether you are ready for CFO support or whether the books need work first, and we will say so plainly if the answer is that you do not need us yet.

What the First Ninety Days Look Like

Month one is diagnostic. We work through the last twelve to twenty-four months of financials, build a picture of how cash actually moves through the business, and establish the handful of measures worth watching. Most owners learn at least one uncomfortable thing in this month, usually about a service line or a client they had assumed was profitable.

Month two is the model. A rolling cash-flow forecast, a budget that reflects the business as it really operates rather than as it was described, and a first pass at the decisions queued up: the hire, the equipment, the price increase, the loan.

Month three is where it starts compounding. The forecast gets compared against what actually happened, which is the point at which a model stops being a spreadsheet and starts being a tool. Owners describe the change as no longer feeling like they are guessing.

None of this requires you to become a finance person. It requires someone in the room who already is, and who will explain their reasoning in plain language rather than defending it with jargon.

Bring Us the Decision You Are Stuck On

Whether you can afford the hire, why cash is tight in a profitable year, or what a lender will want to see. We will tell you honestly whether you are ready for CFO support.

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