Fractional vs. Full-Time FP&A: The Real Cost Math for $5–50M Companies

Somewhere between $5M and $50M in revenue, almost every company hits the same wall. The bookkeeping is handled, the annual budget exists in a spreadsheet, but nobody truly owns forecasting, variance analysis, or the monthly story behind the numbers. The board wants more. The obvious move is to hire an FP&A manager. But "obvious" and "right" are not always the same thing.

Let's do the actual math.

The full-time path

A capable FP&A manager in most U.S. markets commands a base salary of roughly $100K–$130K. Load in benefits, payroll taxes, software licenses, equipment, and recruiting fees, and the fully burdened cost lands closer to $140K–$170K per year — before you account for the two-to-four-month search and the ramp time once they start.

For a company comfortably above $50M in revenue with steady complexity, that is money well spent. A full-time leader builds institutional knowledge, sits in every strategic conversation, and is worth far more than their salary.

The problem appears below that threshold. At $8M or $20M in revenue, you often do not have a full-time amount of FP&A work — you have a critical, board-facing output requirement that shows up most intensely around the monthly close and the quarterly board meeting. Hiring a full-timer to cover a part-time-shaped need means paying for capacity you cannot fully use.

The traditional consultant path

The other reflex is to bring in a finance consultant at $150–$250 per hour. This solves the commitment problem but creates a new one: the meter is always running. A serious monthly close, forecast refresh, and board package can easily absorb 30–50 hours. At consulting rates, that is $5,000–$12,000 a month for work that is often still manual, and you are renting expertise without building any durable system.

The fractional / outsourced path

A fractional FP&A function is built around the insight that the work is recurring and systematizable, not constant. You get the output — close package, budget vs. actual, rolling forecast, KPI dashboard, board reporting — delivered on a monthly cadence for a flat retainer, typically in the $2,000–$3,500 range for companies in this size band.

The economics work because the heavy lifting is automated. Once the models, data connections, and reporting templates are built, producing each month's package is a fraction of the manual effort a consultant would bill for. You are paying for a system that runs, not for hours.

A side-by-side, honestly

The point of this table is not that one path always wins. It is that the full-time hire — the default choice — is frequently the most expensive and the slowest, precisely at the revenue stage where cash and time are tightest.

When each option is the right call

Hire full-time when FP&A work is genuinely constant, when finance needs to be in the room for every strategic decision daily, or when you are scaling past the point where a fractional model can keep up.

Use an hourly consultant for a one-off project — a fundraising model, a carve-out, a specific analysis — where you need a brain for a few weeks and nothing recurring.

Go fractional when you need board-grade reporting now, the need is real but not full-time, and you would rather own a working system than a job opening.

The bottom line

The question is not "consultant or employee." It is "what is the smallest, fastest way to get a finance function that the board trusts?" For a lot of companies between $5M and $50M, the answer is not a $150K hire you will spend two quarters waiting on. It is a system that delivers next month.

Curious how the math looks for your business? Start a conversation — we'll be straight with you about which path fits.