Fractional CFO for Professional Services Firms in New York

Professional services firms sell time, and time creates accounting problems that product businesses never face.

You deliver work over weeks, bill in arrears, collect later still, and pay your people every fortnight throughout. That gap between doing the work and getting paid for it is where New York firms get into trouble.

Work in progress is where the cash hides

Unbilled work is real value that hasn't turned into cash and often hasn't turned into revenue either.

Let WIP build quietly and you get the classic professional services trap: a busy, apparently profitable firm that can't cover payroll. The team is fully occupied, the work is genuinely good, and the money is trapped between delivery and collection.

WIP needs to be measured and aged every month with the same seriousness as receivables. Most firms track receivables carefully and let WIP drift, which is exactly backwards given where the cash actually sits.

Utilisation tells you less than you think

Utilisation is the industry's favourite metric and it's frequently misleading.

High utilisation on underpriced work loses money faster than low utilisation does. A team at 90% on engagements priced below cost is a machine for destroying cash, and the dashboard shows green throughout.

The number that matters is realisation: what you actually collect against what the time was worth. Track that alongside utilisation and mispriced work becomes visible instead of hiding behind a healthy-looking percentage.

Partner distributions aren't profit

In partner-owned firms, distributions frequently get treated as though they're the profit measure. They aren't, and the difference matters.

Distributions leave the bank. They don't appear on the income statement. A firm can distribute its way through its working capital while the P&L looks perfectly healthy, and nobody notices until a slow collection month arrives and there's no buffer left.

Distribution policy needs to be set against a forecast, not against last month's bank balance.

The New York factor

Compensation is the dominant cost line and it's benchmarked against a brutal local market. Salary assumptions built on national averages break instantly here, which is a common reason a firm's growth plan looks affordable on paper and isn't.

Working with me

I'm Ben Cohen, founder of Visionary Arc Finance and a former PwC Senior Manager, with in-house corporate finance experience at Johnson & Johnson. I've worked across services, technology, and manufacturing.

For New York professional services firms, early work usually means getting WIP and realisation visible, building a cash forecast that reflects real collection behaviour rather than invoice dates, and putting a distribution policy on a defensible footing.

Delivered remotely. You work with me directly.

Common questions

Do you work with our practice management system?

I work with whatever produces reliable data. Where the system can't give useful utilisation and realisation reporting, fixing that is usually the first task.

We're a partnership, not a company. Does that change things?

The mechanics of cash, WIP, and realisation are identical. Distribution policy and partner comp add complexity, and that's normally where the useful conversation is.

How small is too small?

If you have a payroll to meet and clients who pay slowly, forecasting earns its cost. Below roughly $2M in fees, a good bookkeeper and a simple forecast often covers it.