Fixed monthly. No timesheets.

On price, we sit in the same band as the established New Zealand virtual CFO practices — broadly $2,500 to $9,500 a month depending on complexity. The difference is what the fee buys. A conventional retainer buys senior hours, and the volume work is either done by a junior or billed on top. Ours includes the platform doing the volume work, so more of the fee is spent on judgement and less on processing.

The honest caveat: if all you need is compliance and an annual return, a traditional accountant will be cheaper and you should use one. We are worth the difference when you need the numbers to be current and defensible, not just correct by June.

Not necessarily. Some clients keep their existing tax agent for the annual return and use XLCFO for everything else. Others consolidate. We will tell you honestly which is better value in your situation, including when the answer is that you do not need us at all.

It stays yours. XLCFO OS connects to your ledger; it does not replace it or lock you in. If you leave, you keep the ledger, the cleaned history, the chart of accounts and every report we produced. There is no proprietary data format and no exit fee.

Agents do the volume work: coding, reconciling, chasing documents, drafting returns, building packs, refreshing forecasts. People do the judgement: revenue recognition, provisioning, tax positions, forecast assumptions, and anything that goes to a board, a lender or a regulator. Roughly speaking, the machine handles the ninety-five per cent that is mechanical so a senior human can spend real time on the five per cent that is not.

No. Client data is never used to train models. It is segregated by client, encrypted in transit and at rest, hosted in Australia and New Zealand regions, and retained under a documented policy. We will provide our sub-processor list and current security posture on request, before you sign anything.

It scales with the size and risk of the mandate. A smaller raise carries a higher monthly retainer and a smaller success percentage, because most of the work is preparation and it happens whether or not the round closes. A larger transaction inverts that — a modest retainer to cover the process and a meaningful success fee on completion, so our interests sit with yours on the outcome and the terms, not just on getting a deal signed.

Both numbers are agreed in the mandate letter before anything starts, along with what counts as a completion event and what happens if you withdraw. We do not take equity in place of fees as a matter of course, though we will discuss it where it genuinely aligns.

Three months to complete onboarding, then month to month with 30 days' notice. Transformation is front-loaded — we would rather you could leave and choose not to.

Yes. We work with New Zealand and Australian companies as a matter of course, and support offshore subsidiaries in other jurisdictions alongside local advisers. Where a jurisdiction needs a licensed local practitioner, we manage that relationship rather than pretend to replace it.

Only with eyes open. Independence matters, and there are situations — a live audit, an investor-nominated independent seat, certain regulated contexts — where the same firm should not do both. We will say so, and we would rather lose the second mandate than compromise the first.

A two-hour kick-off, read-only access to your systems, and roughly two hours a week for the first month while we clean history and confirm coding rules. After that, the time commitment drops to a monthly review call — considerably less than most clients spend chasing their current numbers.