Fractional controller services for owner-managed businesses
Reviewed by EverStone CPA · September 2026
Most growing businesses do not need a CFO. They need someone to close the month properly, produce figures a lender or a board will accept, and say what the cash is going to do next quarter. That is a controller, and you can have one for part of a week.
EverStone CPA is a sole practitioner Chartered Professional Accountant firm in Abbotsford, British Columbia, working remotely with owner-managed businesses across Canada.
Quick answer: A fractional controller owns the accuracy and the readability of your numbers: month-end close, the management reporting pack, budgets and forecasts, cash management, and readiness for an audit or a review. It sits above bookkeeping and below a CFO, and it is usually the rung a business needs first.
What a controller actually does
A bookkeeper records what happened. A controller is responsible for whether what was recorded is right, and for turning it into something a human being can make a decision from. Those are different jobs, and one does not grow into the other by itself.
In practice the work divides into six things. Each is a deliverable with a date attached, not an ongoing vague availability.
- Month-end close. A defined checklist run on a defined day: accruals, prepaids, deferred revenue, intercompany, work in progress, and a reconciliation of every balance sheet account rather than just the bank.
- Management reporting. A monthly pack with the profit and loss against budget, the balance sheet, the cash position, and the three or four numbers that actually run your business.
- Budgeting and forecasting. An annual budget built from the operations rather than from last year plus ten per cent, and a rolling forecast that gets updated when reality disagrees with it.
- Cash management. A thirteen-week cash forecast, a working-capital view of receivables and payables, and enough warning before a tight month to do something about it.
- Audit and review readiness. Working papers assembled as the year goes rather than reconstructed in the spring, so an external engagement costs what it was quoted.
- Oversight of the bookkeeping. Someone reviewing the work of whoever keeps the books, whether that is your staff member or us, so errors are caught in the month they happen.
When a business is ready for one
There is a size where this starts to matter, and it is less about revenue than about how many things can now go wrong at once. Most owner-managed businesses reach it somewhere between two and five million dollars of revenue, but the trigger is rarely the revenue itself.
These are the signals that come up most often, and any two of them together usually mean the answer is yes:
- Someone outside the business now reads your numbers — a lender, a bonding company, an investor, a landlord, a franchisor.
- You are making decisions on the bank balance because the reports arrive too late to use.
- Year end takes months, and the accountant’s adjusting entries are large enough to change what you thought the year looked like.
- You have taken on a project, a location or a product line that is either very profitable or losing money, and you cannot tell which.
- A finance person has left, is going on leave, or has grown into a role bigger than the one they were hired for.
- An audit or a review engagement is coming and nobody has assembled anything for it.
- Payroll, inventory or work in progress has become complicated enough that a mistake is expensive rather than embarrassing.
If none of those are true yet, you probably do not need a controller, and we will say so. Good bookkeeping and a proper year end may be the whole answer for another two years.
Where this sits on the ladder
Four rungs, and most businesses climb them in order. The mistake is not skipping one; it is staying on a rung the business has already outgrown, usually for a year or two longer than it should.
| Level | What it owns | Typical trigger to move up |
|---|---|---|
| Bookkeeping | Recording what happened. Reconciliations, payables, payroll runs, sales tax filings. | You are reading the bank balance instead of a report, because there is no report. |
| Controller | Making the numbers trustworthy and readable. Month-end close, the reporting pack, budgets, cash forecasting, audit readiness. | Someone outside the business — a lender, a board, a buyer — now reads your figures. |
| Fractional CFO | Deciding what the numbers mean. Pricing, capital structure, hiring plans, whether to take the contract. | The decisions have become bigger than the reporting, and getting one wrong would hurt. |
| Full-time CFO | All of the above, in the building, every day. | The finance function is large enough to manage people rather than tasks. |
Not sure which rung you are on? Bookkeeper, controller or CFO works through the question with the signals that actually separate them.
How the engagement works
A free consultation first. Thirty minutes on a video call to understand the business, what is being produced today, and who needs to read it. Nothing is quoted until that has happened. A written scope and a fixed monthly fee. The scope names the deliverables and the dates they arrive on: which day the close is finished, when the pack lands, how often the forecast is refreshed. The fee is fixed for the term and quoted before any work begins. The first ninety days are different. There is almost always cleanup: accounts that have never been reconciled, a chart of accounts that has grown by accident, revenue recognised at the wrong moment. That work is scoped and quoted separately rather than absorbed silently into a monthly fee, because pretending it is free is how monthly fees quietly stop being fixed. Then it runs on a rhythm. The close each month, the pack, a call to go through it, and the forecast updated. You get the same person every month, which for a sole practitioner firm is not a promise that needs managing. You can leave. No long contract and no exit fee. Your records are yours, exported in a usable form, whenever you ask.What it costs
A controller engagement is quoted after a free consultation, because the honest number depends on three things: the transaction volume, how many entities and bank accounts are involved, and the state of the books on the day we start.
For context, the published starting points either side of it are monthly bookkeeping from $300 a month and a fractional CFO engagement from $2,500 a month. A controller engagement sits between the two, and for most owner-managed businesses it is closer to the bookkeeping end than owners expect.
What it is not is an hourly arrangement. Hourly billing on a recurring finance function punishes you for asking questions, which is the opposite of what this is for.
Working with a controller remotely
EverStone is a sole practitioner CPA firm working from one office at 32615 South Fraser Way in Abbotsford, British Columbia. Controller work runs remotely and always has: the ledger is in the cloud, the documents move through a secure portal, the monthly review is a video call, and signatures are electronic.
What remote does not mean is asynchronous only. The monthly review is a conversation, and the point of it is that you can interrupt and ask what a number means. A pack that arrives by email and is never discussed is a report, not a controller.
For businesses in the Fraser Valley an in-person meeting is straightforward. For everyone else the engagement is identical, which is the reason it can be offered at a fixed fee across the country at all.
Fractional controller — common questions
Do I need a bookkeeper or a controller?+
I already have a bookkeeper. Can I still use this?+
What is the difference between this and a fractional CFO?+
How many hours a month is it?+
Can you get us ready for an audit?+
Is this a long commitment?+
What happens to our data?+
Talk to a CPA about this
One Chartered Professional Accountant, start to finish. Fixed fees, quoted in writing before any work begins, and no obligation from a first conversation.
“Sunny and his team have been completing my bookkeeping, taxes and financials for the last 2 years and they have been amazing. Thank you!”