Fractional CFO
A fractional CFO is a senior finance executive who works for you a few days a month instead of full-time. You get the judgment without the salary. Owners call when something with real money attached lands on the table: a bank asking for projections, a buyer opening diligence, an investor asking questions, or a nagging sense that some lanes are losing money and nobody has time to prove it. Engagements are led by the CFO who built ClearLane, after nine years running finance inside operating freight companies.
Five situations come up over and over. If one of them describes where you are, this is the page for you.
A bank wants projections, and then wants them every quarter. A credit facility, a renewal, or an equipment line, and the request comes back for cash flow projections out 6 or 12 months. Then the facility closes and the reporting starts: a borrowing base the bank can verify, and covenant calculations on the schedule the agreement sets. Funded debt to EBITDA, fixed charge coverage, minimum tangible net worth. Most freight companies can produce last month P&L. Far fewer can produce a forward projection a credit committee will accept, with the assumptions written down so the analyst can test them.
A buyer is circling, or you want one to be. Whether you are three years from selling or already have a letter of intent on the desk, the financials decide the multiple as much as the business does. Buyers discount what they cannot verify. Clean, defensible numbers with a story behind them are worth real money at the table, and they take months to build, not weeks.
You are buying something. A smaller competitor, a book of business, a terminal. Someone has to validate what the seller is claiming, model what it looks like combined, and work out what it can be financed with.
You are raising capital. Debt, equity, or a private equity conversation that started casually and got serious. The numbers have to survive diligence, and the person presenting them has to answer follow-up questions in the room.
You cannot tell which lanes and projects actually make money. This sounds like it should be simple. It rarely is. Gross margin per load is easy arithmetic. What is hard is loading the real costs back onto a lane: the detention that never got billed, the reposition mile, the accessorial absorbed to keep a customer happy, the shipper who pays in 62 days while the carrier gets paid in 15. A lane can show a healthy spread and still lose money once cash timing and absorbed charges land on it.
Each of these arrives before a full-time CFO salary makes sense. A full-time freight CFO runs roughly $200,000 to $300,000 in total compensation. Carrying that year-round for work that arrives in bursts is the problem the fractional model exists to solve.
ClearLane offers both, and they solve different problems. A reporting desk produces the numbers on a set cadence: owner and board packages, lender and covenant reporting, multi-entity combined statements. This engagement is the judgment applied to those numbers, and it is what the rest of this page describes.
Most fractional CFOs arrive alone: senior judgment, no production capacity, and a first month spent discovering that the reports they need do not exist. Here the desks produce the numbers, so the CFO hours go to reading them and acting on them rather than assembling them.
| Owner Reporting | Fractional CFO (this page) | |
| What it is | A desk that produces your numbers | A finance executive who uses them |
| What it answers | Where the business stands | What to do about it, and what happens next |
| Shape | Ongoing cadence: weekly, monthly, or quarterly, per your SOP | Built around a decision or an event |
| Priced as | A desk | Executive time |
The one-second test. If you do not trust your numbers, start with owner reporting or bookkeeping. If you trust your numbers and something with real money attached is now on the table, you need this engagement. If neither is true yet, start with the desk and add the judgment layer when the event shows up.
The judgment layer
Most fractional CFOs arrive alone: senior judgment, no production capacity, and a first month spent discovering the reports they need do not exist. ClearLane’s engagement is built the other way. The bookkeeping and reporting desks produce the numbers; the CFO hours go entirely to reading them and acting on them.
That is the difference between paying executive rates for spreadsheet assembly and paying them for the decisions a freight operation actually faces: financing, pricing, lanes, and deals.
In the freight CFO seat
Typical cadence, up to
CFO work is forward-looking. The engagement covers the decisions ahead of the operation, not just the record of what happened:
Owners buying finance leadership for the first time want to know what actually happens. Here is the shape of a typical first quarter:
By the end of the first quarter, the operation has what most freight companies never build: a forecast someone maintains, a package someone reads, and a finance head who answers the phone.
Engagements are led by Alexander Kochas, ClearLane’s founder, after nine years in the CFO seat at operating logistics companies spanning drayage, intermodal, freight forwarding, warehousing, transloading, and export crating. He has also been on both sides of freight M&A, as a buyer and as a seller, and has produced the lender packages and covenant reporting his own credit facilities required. When a bank asks for a borrowing base certificate or a buyer opens diligence, he has answered from the operator’s chair before.
He does not work alone. Behind every engagement sit ClearLane’s dedicated teams: the bookkeeping desk keeping records current, the reporting desk producing the packages, and the operating desks feeding them clean data. The CFO hours are the limited resource, so they are reserved for the forward-looking work; everything that can be produced by a desk, is. Connect with Alexander on LinkedIn, or read the full story on the about page.
The engagement fits owner-led freight operations, typically moving 500 to 8,000 loads a month or the trucking and NVOCC equivalents, where a financing event, a possible transaction, or a margin question is on the table or visible on the horizon. It also fits owners who already have a fractional CFO relationship elsewhere and need the freight-literate version.
It does not fit three situations, and it is better to say so here. If you need tax or audit work, that is your CPA, and we will say the same in the first call. If you need a daily on-site executive, you need a hire, not a fraction. And if what you actually need is clean books or a reliable monthly package rather than decisions, start with outsourced bookkeeping or owner reporting, at desk pricing rather than executive pricing, and add the judgment layer when a decision shows up.
We read what exists: the books, the packages, the facilities, and the questions already on the table.
If the reporting layer is missing, the desks build it, so executive hours never go to assembly.
Monthly close review, a rolling 13-week cash forecast, and a KPI pack the owner actually reads.
When financing, pricing, or a transaction lands, the cadence flexes around the deal until it closes.
Decisions stop waiting. The credit line gets renegotiated before the squeeze, not during it. The factoring facility gets priced against a real alternative. The lane that only looked profitable gets caught in a quarter instead of a year. And when a buyer or lender calls, the financials are ready before the second phone call, which is worth more in a deal than almost anything else on this page.
Lender work deserves its own line, because it is where owners most often feel outmatched. A bank looks at a freight borrower and wants the same few things: a borrowing base it can trust, aging that matches reality, covenant calculations that arrive before they are asked for, and a person on the other end who speaks the language. Producing that reliably changes the relationship, and often the pricing.
Underneath the judgment sits the stack that makes it fast: outsourced bookkeeping keeping the records current, and owner reporting producing the packages. The working-capital stakes are visible in the freight DSO and AR benchmarks: structured finance operations run weeks ahead of unstructured ones.
Scope, stated plainly: this is finance leadership, not compliance work. Tax filings and audited statements stay with your CPA, as they should. It is also not a controller-for-hire arrangement; the desks handle production, and the engagement stays at the level where judgment earns its rate. Engagements are scoped per operation, and pricing is discussed in the first conversation, not published as a menu.
The engagement works inside your existing finance stack. No migration, no new software, and no dependency on tools your team does not already run.
QuickBooksXeroFreshBooksSage
Alexander Kochas, ClearLane’s founder, who spent nine years as CFO inside operating drayage, intermodal, and forwarding companies before building ClearLane. This is not a bench of interchangeable consultants; it is a named person with an operating record, which is also why capacity is limited.
A small number at a time, deliberately. Senior hours do not scale like desk work, and an engagement only makes sense if the cadence can actually be kept. When the calendar is full, we say so and offer a start date rather than a diluted engagement.
No. Tax filings, attestations, and audited statements stay with your CPA. The engagement is finance leadership: cash, margin, financing, reporting review, and deal work. It pairs well with a good CPA and does not compete with one.
Not as a requirement, but sequencing matters. If the reporting layer is missing, the first weeks of any CFO engagement become assembly work at executive rates. Where that layer does not exist, the desks typically build it in the first 30 to 60 days so the CFO hours land on judgment from the start.
It is scoped to the operation and the cadence, and priced in the first conversation once we have seen what exists. As market context, fractional arrangements broadly run at a fraction of the $200,000 to $300,000 cost of a full-time CFO hire, which is the comparison that matters.
Four things, consistently: a borrowing base built on receivables they can verify, an aging report that matches what the borrowing base claims, covenant calculations delivered on schedule without being chased, and financial statements that reconcile to the operating system behind them. A freight borrower who produces those four reliably gets easier renewals, faster answers, and a better hearing when something goes sideways. Most of the work is reporting discipline; the rest is knowing which questions the credit committee will ask before they ask them.
A 13-week cash forecast is a week-by-week picture of cash in and cash out for the next quarter. Not profit. Cash. It answers one specific question: on the week of the 14th, after carrier payments, payroll, the insurance draft, and the fuel card settlement, what is actually in the account. Thirteen weeks is the standard window because it is far enough out to see a squeeze coming and close enough that you can still do something about it.
Longer projections are a different document, and lenders and buyers usually want those instead: 6 months, 12 months, sometimes 24 or 36 for a credit committee or a diligence file. Those run at monthly granularity, cover profit and loss as well as cash, and live or die on whether the assumptions behind them are written down and defensible. We build both. If a lender has already asked you for something specific, bring the request to the first call.
Owner Reporting produces your numbers on a set cadence and answers where the business stands. This engagement uses those numbers to make decisions and to represent them to a bank, a buyer, or an investor.
If you do not trust your numbers, start with reporting. If you trust them and a decision or an event has landed, you need the CFO. Many operations run both, with the desks feeding the CFO so executive hours never go to assembly.
Yes, and the earlier the better. Sell-side work means getting the financials into a state that survives diligence, assembling the package a buyer team will ask for, documenting the EBITDA add-backs so each one ties to something, and making sure the numbers tell a story that supports the valuation. This takes months rather than weeks, and it is one of the most common reasons owners start a CFO engagement.
Cut DSO and collect faster with a managed accounts receivable (AR) desk that works every open invoice.
See how POD, AP audit, billing, AR, compliance, and bookkeeping fit together.
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One email, straight to the founder's desk. Tell us what is on the table: a financing event, a possible transaction, margin questions, or reporting that needs to exist first.
