What Does "Good" Look Like?

The free money era is over. The "grow at all costs" playbook is dead. And in its place, a very different mandate has taken hold across the CPG landscape: prove you're profitable - or prove you can be.

That shift has sent a wave of brand founders and operators scrambling to enlist fractional finance help. Fractional CFOs, outsourced accounting firms, strategic finance consultants - the titles vary, but the goal is the same: get someone who actually knows the numbers to help run the finance function.

Here's the problem. Most founders hiring a fractional CFO or finance partner for the first time don't know what "good" looks like. They don't know what the deliverables should be. They don't know how to measure value. And that means they end up overpaying for underwhelming work, or worse, thinking they have financial visibility when they're actually flying blind.

So let's fix that. Below is the bare minimum you should expect from a strategic finance partner, what separates good from great, and what puts someone in truly elite territory. I'm assuming your bookkeeping, accounting, and tax compliance are already handled — this is about everything above that layer.

The Bare Minimum: What Every Fractional CFO Should Deliver

If your outsourced finance partner isn't delivering these three things, it's time for a serious conversation or a new partner.

A Financial Planning Model That Actually Reflects Your Business

First and foremost, your fractional CFO should be providing you with a financial model. Full stop. If you are paying someone for strategic finance advice and they don't give you a forward-looking plan for your income statement and balance sheet - run.

And I don't mean a generic template they downloaded and slapped your logo on. Every CPG brand is different. Your product mix, your channel mix, your margin structure, your seasonality - it's all nuanced. Your financial model should reflect your business's chart of accounts and therefore your business model. Not someone else's.

The model should be forecasted monthly for at least 36 months. That gives you enough runway to plan for inventory purchases, cash needs, fundraising timelines, and retail expansion - the decisions that actually make or break a physical products brand.

One more thing most firms miss: the model should be forecasting recurring revenue from previously acquired customer cohorts. If your forecast doesn't account for how past customers repurchase over time, your revenue projections are a guess and your inventory plan is probably wrong too.

Variance Analysis: Plan vs. Actuals, Every Month

Your strategic finance partner should provide you with a monthly report of plan vs. actuals. We sometimes call it a "variance analysis" to sound fancy, but it's literally just: what happened vs. what our forecast said would happen.

This sounds basic. It is basic. And yet a shocking number of founders I talk to either don't get this report at all, or they get a set of financials with zero context around what changed and why.

Bonus points — and honestly, this should be standard — if your finance partner sits down with you to assess the source of each variance. Was it a revenue miss? A COGS surprise? A timing issue with an Amazon payout? The numbers alone aren't useful without the "why" behind them.

A 13-Week Cash Flow Model

CPG is a brutal business from a cash flow perspective. You're buying inventory 90–120 days before you sell it. You're fronting money for packaging, freight, warehousing, and marketing all before a single dollar hits your bank account. And if you're in retail, tack on another 30–60 days for payment terms.

Tracking weekly and quarterly cash flow is crucial. Your fractional CFO should be maintaining a rolling 13-week cash flow model that gives you visibility into exactly when cash is coming in, when it's going out, and whether you're going to hit a wall.

If you don't have this and you're running a CPG brand doing $10M+, that should make you uncomfortable.

Above and Beyond: Signs You're in Good Hands

If your fractional CFO is delivering the three items above plus the following, you've got a strong partner. Hold onto them.

Monthly variance deep-dives with reassessment. Not just flagging the variance - actually digging into why the model was off each month and recalibrating the forecast. This is the difference between a static model and a living, breathing planning tool.

Cohort profitability and CAC payback analysis. Understanding which customer acquisition cohorts are actually paying back, and on what timeline, is critical for making smart decisions about ad spend, channel allocation, and growth targets. If your finance partner can diagnose cohort-level profitability inside the model, that's a meaningful step up.

A monthly performance report alongside the financials. Not just the numbers, but a narrative. What's working, what's not, what needs to change. A good strategic finance partner translates the spreadsheet into action items.

The Top 0.05%: Elite-Level Finance Support

If your fractional CFO is doing the following, you've found a unicorn. Never leave.

Daily contribution margin tracking vs. plan. Not monthly. Not weekly. Daily. This is how the best-run CPG brands operate; they know, every single day, whether they're making money at the unit level. If your finance partner can deliver this, they are giving you an operational edge most brands simply don't have.

Daily net income tracking vs. plan. Same principle, extended to the full P&L. Real-time financial visibility is the difference between reacting to problems and preventing them.

Data-driven benchmarking and optimization. Using your data,  and ideally cross-brand benchmarking data, to proactively identify areas where your brand is underperforming relative to peers. This flips the finance function from backward-looking to forward-looking.

Financial analytics dashboarding. Moving beyond static spreadsheets into interactive dashboards where you and your team can explore the numbers in real time. No more waiting for a monthly email with a PDF attached.

Custom ad-hoc reporting. The ability to answer one-off questions quickly — "What's our blended margin on TikTok Shop orders this month?" or "How did that retail promo actually impact gross profit?" — without a two-week turnaround.

Technology implementation. Helping you build the actual infrastructure - connecting your Shopify, Amazon, NetSuite, 3PL, and ad platform data into a cohesive financial picture. This is where finance meets ops, and very few fractional CFOs play here.

Sourcing working capital financing. Knowing the landscape of debt facilities, revenue-based financing, and inventory financing options, and helping you find the right capital partner at the right terms. This alone can be worth the entire engagement fee.

The Uncomfortable Truth

Here's the thing most people won't say out loud: the fractional CFO model has real limitations. Even the best fractional partner is splitting their time across multiple brands. They're doing most of this work manually, in spreadsheets, on a weekly or monthly cadence. And the truly elite deliverables I described above — daily tracking, real-time dashboarding, automated benchmarking — are nearly impossible to deliver consistently with a human-and-spreadsheet approach.

That's not a knock on fractional CFOs. It's simply a structural constraint. And it's exactly why we built Iris — to give every CPG brand the financial visibility and analytical horsepower that used to require a full-time finance team and a six-figure data stack.

But whether you use Iris or not, use this as your measuring stick. Know what good looks like. Demand it. Your margins depend on it.