How an engagement runs
Fractional, a few days a month, never a permanent seat. Five stages, each ending in something you can hold. This is what working with Adastra Solutions looks like, hands on.
The process comes from the founder's own seat. At Parkside, Syrous Abtine needed daily operating numbers and sell-side readiness at the same time, without carrying a full-time CFO, an M&A adviser and a Big 4 engagement all at once. The five stages below are that need, turned into a method.
Assessment: how is the company set up financially?
Mostly listening and reading. Entities, countries and currencies. The accounting setup: your internal finance staff and the external Steuerberater, when the close actually lands, whether one month is comparable to the next. What the founder and the leadership team see today, how old it is when it arrives, and how far ahead cash is visible.
And the data map: which sources exist beyond accounting, what shape they are in, who owns them. Trial balances, payroll and HR data, operational hours from time tracking, the sales pipeline, cost centres.
A written assessment with a prioritized plan, and a first CFO Foundry pack generated from your last trial balances. Unpolished by design: it shows what your data can already say and exactly where it falls short.
Implementation: change what has to change, introduce what is missing
Chart of accounts and bookings. Clean up what grew by accident, agree booking conventions with the Steuerberater, accruals monthly rather than at year end. A negotiation as much as a task.
The structures the reports need. Cost centres that match how the business runs, project and client structures where contribution will be measured, HR data in a defined shape, the pipeline export agreed with sales.
The mapping. Every account mapped once into the engine. From here on, reports are generated, not built.
The handover paths. For each data source an owner, a shape, and a date in the month. Written down, agreed with the people who deliver.
The first full monthly pack, reviewed together: every view, from your real systems, on a date that was promised.
Cadence: a rhythm the company holds
Data lands by a fixed day. Close. The pack is generated and distributed. Then one review meeting: what moved, why, and the two or three decisions the numbers ask for. Decisions minuted, revisited next month. The forecast rolls forward, so a miss surfaces while the quarter can still be changed.
Just as important: your people learn the rhythm. Internal staff and the external accountants deliver without being chased, and the team starts reading its own numbers. That takes months of habit rather than a project plan, and it is what makes everything durable.
Deepening: the same rhythm carries more weight
Planning and budgeting, with variance against actuals every month. Scenario work when a decision is large.
Pricing from delivery cost. What an hour costs, what it sells for, what each project and client contributes.
The cost base. Vendor and software spend, contracts, tooling that fits your size. Bringing AI into financial operations and reporting where it earns its place.
Board and bank reporting from the same figures. No parallel spreadsheets.
Transaction readiness: earned either way
No exit intent required, and no separate project when intent arrives. One-off and shareholder-related costs are documented as they occur: documented then, they get accepted; reconstructed later, they get challenged. The data room grows as a by-product of the monthly pack, not as a ninety-day scramble before diligence.
And when a transaction is live, the numbers get defended: during diligence and after it, through the earnout and true-up mechanics where real money still moves.
Built for handover
Woven through every stage rather than a stage of its own. The mapping, the data map and the cadence are documented so your team can run the process.
The output
The reports, the Excel exports, the data room. Ordinary files, built from your data, yours for good, including everything ever generated.
Continuity
The monthly pack does not have to stop when the engagement does. A continuity licence, letting your team keep generating the same reports, is on the roadmap.
Stage zero is a conversation
Which entities, which accounting systems, what you need to see. After that call you will know whether this fits, and so will we.
Get in touch → New here? Start with what CFO Foundry is →