What a firm should charge for controller work

The short answer

Price the recurring scope as a fixed monthly fee, and set that fee from what the engagement consumes every month — not from the hours a quiet month happens to take.

The profession has already moved. Only 10 percent of client advisory services practices still use hourly billing as their primary method, down from 53 percent in 2018 (CPA.com and AICPA PCPS 2024 CAS Benchmark Survey). Controller work fits the fixed-fee model well. What it needs first is a named scope.

Why hourly fails this work specifically

Hourly prices attention, and the most valuable month is often the quietest one. A controller engagement that is working produces fewer emergencies, so the invoice falls exactly as the value rises. The client reads the falling invoice as the service mattering less.

It also prices the wrong thing. What the client is buying is that their position is current when they ask, which is upkeep carried all month, not the twenty minutes spent answering.

What the monthly scope has to name

A fee without a named scope gets compared against bookkeeping, because bookkeeping is the part the client can see. Four things are worth stating explicitly.

What arrives on a cadence. The close, the statements, the variance commentary, and the date each one lands. This is the part most engagements already name.

What stays current between those dates. The forecast, the open commitments, the assumptions behind them. This is the part that is almost never named, and the part the client is actually paying for.

How many questions are included. Not to ration them, but so that both sides know when the volume has changed enough to reprice.

What counts as a project. A financing package, a system migration, a diligence request. Naming these keeps them from arriving inside the monthly fee.

That last one is where margin goes. Undefined continuous work is not unpriced because firms undervalue it — it is unpriced because it never appeared in the scope, so it was absorbed into partner time and never counted. The cost of a quick question is the measurable version of that leak.

Setting the number

Measure one month across three or four representative clients: the scheduled work, the between-call questions, and the time spent rebuilding the current picture before answering them. Price from the total, then look at the split. Where most of the hours are reconstruction rather than judgement, that is the part to attack before repricing, because it is the part that can be removed rather than just charged for.

How much of that a single person can carry is the capacity question, answered in how many clients a fractional controller can handle. The scope being priced is set out in controller services.

Frequently asked questions

What is the right monthly number?

We will not publish a range. We have no survey of controller-work pricing we would stand behind, and a made-up range gets quoted back as a benchmark. Price it from what your own engagements consume, which is a number you can measure in a month and nobody else can give you.

Should between-call questions be billed separately?

Billing them separately teaches the client not to ask, which costs you the early warning that makes the advice worth paying for. The better move is to price the expected volume into the monthly fee and set a threshold above which a question becomes a project.

What if the client says it is too expensive?

That is usually a scope conversation rather than a price one. An engagement that has not named what arrives every month is being compared against bookkeeping, because bookkeeping is the only part the client can see.

About the author

Nilanjan Raychaudhuri is the founder of AgentLink (Tublian LLC, Columbus, Ohio), which builds controller-layer software sold through CPA and fractional CFO firms. He has spent the past year interviewing practitioners at fractional CPA and CFO practices about how advisory work is actually delivered. Team page

Billing-method data from the CPA.com and AICPA PCPS 2024 CAS Benchmark Survey. Practitioner observations come from design-partner conversations and are used with permission where attributed. Corrections to nilanjan@agentlink.finance.