You have a question with a number in it. Can we afford the second location? What does the bank see when it reads our projections? What happens to cash if the big customer pays in 75 days instead of 45? Nobody on your team has the week a real answer takes, so you are thinking about paying someone outside to build the model. This page covers what that service should hand you, what it costs next to the alternatives, what to send so the first build is right, and how to judge the work when it comes back.
What you are buying
A financial model is a spreadsheet that answers a question and shows its working. Change an input and the answer moves, and you can see why. That is different from a report, which shows what happened, and from a template, which shows what a model for a business like yours might look like. The common requests, roughly in order of how often they come up:
- A cash flow forecast, weekly for the next quarter or monthly for the year, with a minimum cash line.
- A budget with a budget vs. actual page that stays useful past February.
- A three-statement model for a lender, an investor or a board.
- Pricing and unit economics: what a customer is worth, what it costs to get one, where the price should sit.
- A board or investor pack whose exhibits all read from the same inputs.
- A repair of the sheet you already have, the one that was built by someone who left.
When it makes sense to outsource it
You have a finance question and nobody with the time to answer it. A lender or an investor has asked for projections. A board meeting is on the calendar. You are about to change prices. Your bookkeeper is excellent at the books and has never built a forecast. Or the person who built your spreadsheets is gone, and the file they left behind has numbers in it nobody can explain.
It makes less sense when the question is one of strategy or judgment. A modeler can tell you what the numbers say under a set of assumptions; deciding which assumptions to believe, and what to do about them, is a different job, and a fractional CFO may be the better spend.
What it costs
There are four ways to get the work done, and they are priced on different axes.
| Option | Typical cost | What you are paying for | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Financial analyst on staff | $90K+ a year plus benefits | Capacity. Worth it when there is 30+ hours of work a week, every week. |
| 2 | Fractional CFO | $8–15K a month, billed hourly | Judgment and presence. The model itself is often delegated or billed at partner rates. |
| 3 | Freelance modeler | $75–200 an hour | One deliverable, scoped up front. Good for a single well-defined model. |
| 4 | Subscription (this site) | $1,950 a month, flat | A queue. One request in progress at a time, as many as you need, fixed cost. |
The honest comparison: for one model and nothing after it, a freelancer with a crisp spec can be cheaper. A subscription earns its keep when there is a stream of work, because the monthly fee covers the reporting pack in week one, the forecast refresh in week two and the pricing question that comes up in week three, without a new scope, a new quote or a new person each time.
What to send so the first build is right
Most of the back-and-forth in outsourced modeling comes from an incomplete brief, so the brief is worth ten minutes. Five things:
- The question, in one sentence. “Will we run out of cash before the Q2 receivables land?” beats “a cash flow model.”
- Who reads it. A lender wants covenant tests and a downside case. A board wants one page. You want the one lever you can pull.
- The data, in whatever state it is in. A trial balance export, a general ledger dump, a bank download, last year’s budget in three different formats. Cleaning it up is part of the work; guessing at what you didn’t send is not possible.
- The deadline, and whether it is a real one.
- What done looks like. “The closing cash line for thirteen weeks, with the covenant test underneath it” is a finish line. “Something the bank will like” is not.
What good looks like when it comes back
You should be able to tell within five minutes whether the model was built with care, before you check a single number:
- It opens with zero error cells after a full recalculation.
- A README sheet says what the model does, what to change and what not to touch.
- Every input lives on one sheet, in one color. Every formula is another color. Nothing is typed over in the middle of a calculation.
- A checks sheet at the end lists the tie-outs and whether each one passes.
- Someone walks you through it, in writing or on a call, in plain language.
Then run the ten checks in how to check a financial model you didn’t build. The one most people skip is the one that matters: break a formula on purpose and see whether the model’s own checks notice.
How we do it
Every workbook we deliver goes through three gates before it reaches your board. It is recalculated with a formula engine, and one error cell means it does not ship. Each tie-out is deliberately broken and then repaired, to prove the check is capable of failing. And a second, independent pass rebuilds the headline numbers from the inputs and compares them to the model. That pass returns a pass or a reject with cell references; a reject goes back to the builder, not to you.
What it is not
We build the spreadsheet. We do not do your bookkeeping, file your taxes, audit your accounts or give investment advice. The numbers that go into the model come from your books, and if something in your data looks wrong we will say so before building on it, but the books themselves are yours. If what you need is someone to close the month, this is not that service.
If it is what you need, it is $1,950 a month and the first request goes on the board the day you sign up. The pricing section is on the home page.