Hiring a fractional CFO for a family office
A fractional CFO for a family office is a senior finance lead who works for the family one or two days a week, across every entity the family owns, reporting to the principals rather than to a board. The job is not the same as running the finance function of a company. A company has one balance sheet and a budget cycle. A family has operating businesses, property, a portfolio of fund commitments, trusts, and personal spending, none of which were set up to report together, and the CFO's first job is to make them.
A fractional CFO in the UK charges £800 to £1,500 a day, which is £6,133 to £11,500 a month at two days a week. The bands for all eleven seats come off live listings on the bench and are published openly as data.
What is different about this seat in family offices
The consolidation is across structures that were never designed to consolidate
A trading company, three properties held in two different vehicles, a handful of fund commitments, a trust for the children and the principals' own accounts each produce their own numbers on their own timetable. The family wants one answer: what are we worth, what is liquid, and what is coming up. Producing that answer means building a single view on top of entities that have different year ends, different advisers and different accounting bases, and keeping it current. A corporate CFO has never had to do this, and the ones who have done it once ask in the first week how many entities there are and where each set of books lives.
The cash forecast belongs to the family, not to a business
What empties a family's liquidity is rarely the operating company. It is a capital call from a fund commitment that arrives with ten days notice, a tax payment on a date that was always known and never planned for, a distribution the family has come to expect, or a property purchase decided over a weekend. The CFO's calendar has those on it, twelve months out, with the source of the cash for each one named. A forecast that only covers the trading business misses the events that actually matter.
Reporting on the investment managers without becoming one
Most families hold their investments through external managers, private banks and funds. The CFO does not pick the managers. The CFO makes sure the family can see what each one costs, in management fees, performance fees and the spread on the bank's own products, and what each one has returned, in terms a principal will read. That means one page, not forty, with the same measures used for every manager so they can be compared. Families routinely discover the real cost of a relationship only when somebody finally puts the fees on one line.
Payment controls in an office where three people move very large sums
A small office with a trusted bookkeeper and a principal who approves everything by text message is the setting in which invoice fraud and misdirected transfers succeed. The CFO puts in dual authorisation on payments above a threshold, a verified-beneficiary process for any new payee, and a monthly review of who has access to what. This is unglamorous and it is the single change most likely to save the family a seven-figure sum. It also has to be done with some tact, because the people being controlled have usually been with the family for years.
What the seat owns here
- The consolidated view of net worth and liquidity across every entity, kept current
- The twelve-month cash calendar: tax dates, capital calls, distributions and committed purchases
- Fee and performance reporting on external managers, on one page, in comparable terms
- Payment controls and access reviews in an office where a small team handles large transfers
- The working relationship with the family's existing advisers: the accountant, the tax adviser, the trustees and the private bank
- The documentation that lets the next generation, or a successor, understand the structure without the person who built it
What to ask a fractional CFO for family offices
- How many entities did you consolidate for the last family you worked with, and in what tool?
- Tell me about a capital call or tax payment the family did not see coming. What changed afterwards?
- How do you present manager fees and performance to a principal who will not read a long pack?
- What payment controls did you introduce in a small office, and how did the long-standing staff take it?
- Which of the family's advisers did you work alongside rather than replace, and how did you divide the work?
- Have you worked through a liquidity event, a sale, a succession or a death, and what did the finance side of it involve?
Where it goes wrong
- Hiring a corporate CFO who expects a board, a budget cycle and a management team, and finds a family and a bookkeeper
- Letting the reporting follow the accountant's year end rather than the dates on which the family actually decides things
- Not saying whether the role is CFO of the main trading business, finance lead for the family's affairs, or both, so the person is pulled between them
- Skipping payment controls because everyone is trusted, which is exactly the condition fraud relies on
- Treating the private bank's quarterly statement as performance reporting when it is a sales document
When this is the wrong hire
If the family's affairs amount to one operating business with its own finance director, a home, and investments run by a single private bank, a good accountant and the bank's reporting cover it and a fractional CFO is early. The seat earns its cost once there are several entities, a direct investment or fund commitment programme, a property portfolio, or a liquidity or succession event in the next two years.
The rate, in all three markets
The UK band comes off live listings on the bench, so it is our own data rather than a scrape or somebody else's index. The US and UAE bands are market observation and say so. Every figure below is also available as JSON and CSV.
£800 to £1,500 a day
£6,133 to £11,500 a month at two days a week. All eleven seats
$1,000 to $2,200 a day
AED 3,500 to AED 7,500 a day
Higher end for fundraise or exit work, and for regulated sectors.
Common questions
What does a fractional CFO cost for a family office?
The same published bands as any other fractional CFO engagement. Family office work is more often one day a week than two, with the engagement stepping up around a transaction, a restructuring or the setting up of the office itself, and stepping back down afterwards.
Does a family office CFO need to be a qualified accountant?
Usually, and usually with experience in a corporate finance function first. The trust, tax and legal structuring stays with the family's advisers; the CFO's job is to make the structure legible and run the money inside it. What matters more than the qualification is having done this for a family before, because the working style is unlike a company.
Can a fractional CFO be the family office's only finance person?
Yes, at one day a week with a bookkeeper or an outsourced accountant doing the transactions. The condition is controls: with one senior person part-time, the dual authorisation on payments and the access review have to be in place from the first month, because nobody is looking over anybody's shoulder the rest of the week.
What about family offices in the UAE?
A growing number of families are setting up in the DIFC and ADGM, and the fractional structure works the same way there. The rate bands in dirhams and the way engagements are contracted in the UAE are on the UAE pages of this site.
Check these for yourself
Rules change and a summary written today can be wrong by the time you read it. Nothing here is legal or regulatory advice, and anything you are about to rely on is worth confirming with the authority itself.
See the rate before you speak to anybody
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