How is a fractional CFO priced in the UAE, and what moves the price?
Most firms charge a monthly fee. Accounting firms selling a “virtual CFO” package usually charge the least, CFO practices more. Where you land depends on the work:
- How many companies, and in how many countries.
- The state of the books when we start.
- Whether a raise, a loan or an acquisition is coming.
- How many days a week the business needs.
Most of our work is a monthly retainer. Some of it is a project: a lender’s model, a deal, a finance transformation.
How do I know it pays for itself?
Compare it with the cost of not having a CFO. The hire made too early. The market entered blind. The raise pushed back by months. That cost is often far greater than the fee.
The firms that publish prices put a full-time CFO in the UAE at AED 400,000 to 1,200,000 a year and more. Against that, you pay for one to two days a week, and the judgment you get is senior.
What you pay for is that judgment. Not every metric matters. Only a few drive the result, and knowing which ones comes from having run businesses and looked at hundreds of them. I worked with a software group under serious financial pressure. The instinct was to cut everything: marketing, R&D, even key hires. We mapped where the money went first. Then we cut the low-value spend and postponed the projects with a low chance of paying back, even the ones with big upside, because now wasn’t the time for risk. We kept the R&D and the work on keeping customers. Within months the cash flow stabilised, and recurring revenue kept growing.
How does an engagement work: how long, how much of my time, how does it end?
On a retainer, the first two to three months are the heavy part. We hold a few working sessions with you, and we go deep into the financials until we can see the business clearly. That’s when the numbers get fixed and the questions that matter come out. After that it settles at one to two days a week.
Your time goes on those sessions, then a regular check-in on the few numbers that matter. The digging is ours.
A project ends when the model or the deal is done, or when the new set-up runs on its own. After a deal, it can carry on for the integration. A retainer runs for as long as the company needs it.