A part-time CFO who takes the whole finance side of your company off your hands.

That result is from the finance function I run today, and it is the kind of result I work towards for a client.

Sixteen years running my own finance practice, with up to thirty companies at the same time and teams of up to eleven people.

Then Sweden: first keeping the books of more than fifteen Swedish companies at an accounting firm, then building the finance function of the Swedish company of an international group from the day it was set up, and running it since.

And four companies of my own. That is why I do not read a business only through its accounts. I have set prices, met payroll at the end of a month, explained a bad quarter to a bank, and watched a product everyone praised fail to sell.

More about me, including what happened to each of those four companies.

This is the question I am asked more than any other, and it always has an answer. The money is somewhere. In invoices nobody chased. In stock you bought too much of. In tax paid ahead. In a loan repayment that was never in anyone's plan.

First I show you where it went. Then I build a cash plan that runs months ahead, week by week, so you see a gap coming while you can still do something about it. Not on the day the salaries are due.

In my experience this is the right place to start. It is quick, it often finds money the company did not know it had, and it tells you more about the company than the annual accounts do.

You know your business. Then a report arrives, and it describes a company you are not sure is yours. Nobody explains how one turned into the other. After a while you stop looking at the reports and run the company on instinct. That works, until the year it does not.

You do not have to understand this.
That is my job.

What you should be able to do is take any figure and know what in your business made it that number. And have somebody to ask on the day it does not add up.

Often not yet, and that is a real answer, not a polite one. A full-time finance director, the in-house version of a CFO, costs a company in Sweden more than 100,000 kronor a month once employer contributions are counted, and considerably more than that in a larger company.

In my experience, what a company at that point needs is the work a finance director does, a few days a month, done by somebody who has done it before. Not a hire. Not a recruitment process. Not a fixed cost you carry through a bad quarter.

So the first thing I will tell you is which of the two you are looking at. If you need a full-time finance director, I will say so, and you will have lost one conversation.

Then the problem usually looks different. The Swedish company's numbers do not match what head office sees. The monthly report arrives late. The local accounting firm answers questions about accounting entries, not about the business. Nobody in Sweden can explain the difference.

I sit between the Swedish company, its accounting firm and your head office. I reconcile the Swedish figures with the group's reporting and explain every difference to you, in English.

Three stages. Each one has its scope, its price and its end agreed before it starts, and each one is worth having on its own.