Bookkeeper, controller or CFO — which one do you actually need?
Updated
Sellers use these three titles interchangeably, but each owns a different question, and buying the wrong one means overpaying or still missing what you needed.
EverStone CPA is a sole practitioner Chartered Professional Accountant firm working remotely with owner-managed businesses across BC.
Quick answer: A bookkeeper records what happened. A controller makes sure it is right and turns it into a report you can act on. A CFO decides what to do about it. Most owner-managed businesses under about five million dollars of revenue need the first two, and need the second one long before they think they do.
On this page
Bookkeeper, controller or CFO: the one-line difference
A useful test is to ask which question the person is accountable for answering. If you are asking what is the difference between a bookkeeper, a controller, and a CFO, the answer starts with that one question.
- Bookkeeper: “What happened?” — the transactions are entered, coded, reconciled and filed.
- Controller: “Is that right, and where do we stand?” — the close is complete, the balances are supported, and the report is one a lender would accept.
- CFO: “What should we do about it?” — pricing, capital, hiring, whether to take the contract, when to buy the building.
They fail differently. Bad bookkeeping gives wrong numbers; no controller, right but useless numbers; no CFO, good numbers nobody acts on.
What each one is responsible for
| Bookkeeper | Controller | CFO | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Transactions and coding | Owns it | Reviews it | — |
| Bank and account reconciliations | Bank | Every balance sheet account | — |
| Payroll and sales tax filings | Owns it | Reviews it | — |
| Month-end close | — | Owns it | — |
| Management reporting pack | — | Owns it | Reads and acts on it |
| Budget and forecast | — | Builds and maintains | Sets the assumptions |
| Cash forecasting | — | Owns it | Decides what to do about it |
| Audit or review readiness | Supplies documents | Owns it | — |
| Pricing, capital, major decisions | — | Supplies the numbers | Owns it |
| Lender and investor relationships | — | Supplies the reporting | Owns it |
Read down the controller column and you see why many businesses sense something missing without naming it: nobody is doing that column.
The three mistakes owners make here
Expecting a bookkeeper to become a controller. They are different skills, and a good bookkeeper is not made better by being asked to do a job they were not hired for. This is the most common version, and it usually surfaces at year end when the adjusting entries turn out to be large. Buying a CFO to fix a reporting problem. If the month-end close does not happen, a CFO’s first three months are spent building one. That is controller work bought at CFO rates, and it is the most expensive way to arrive at a reporting pack. Waiting for a crisis. The trigger is usually a lender asking for something, a year end going badly, or a finance person resigning. All three are more expensive to solve under time pressure than they would have been six months earlier.What each one costs
Prices on this site are published. That makes a fractional controller vs CFO vs bookkeeper comparison a matter of reading the published fees below.
- Bookkeeping starts at $325 a month and scales with transaction volume. See the published fees.
- Controller starts at $1,650 a month, between the two — the final figure depends on volume, entities and the state of the books on day one. What a fractional controller includes.
- Fractional CFO starts at $2,750 a month, scoped to the hours and the decisions in front of you. How the engagement runs.
A full-time controller in British Columbia is a salaried hire with employer costs on top, and the fractional version exists because most businesses in this range need perhaps a quarter of that person.
Other fractional cfo or controller work
The rest of what this covers, and the page each one is on.
Common questions about the three roles
Can one person be all three?+
We are about $3M in revenue. Which do we need?+
Our accountant does the year end. Is that not a controller?+
Do we still need a year-end accountant if we have a controller?+
If the question is about designations rather than roles, bookkeeper, accountant or CPA explains what each is actually licensed to do.