Frequently asked questions
Find answers to the most common questions we hear from Ecommerce & D2C founders while hiring a CFO.
General questions:
Get answers to the most common questions we get about CFO Expertise, our founder Jarrod Souza, and CFOs for Ecommerce brands.
If you're an Ecommerce or D2C brand selling primarily on Shopify and/or Amazon, CFO Expertise was founded specifically for you. We have 10+ years of experience catering to Ecommerce CFO needs and we hold that as our primary focus when helping companies. We're entrepreneurs ourselves so we understand what it's like to scale companies and we apply that first-hand knowledge to helping with your finances.
Jarrod Souza is the Founder and leading CFO for CFO Expertise. Jarrod founded the company in 2020 after 15+ years as a CFO for companies like Michael Hyatt across multiple industries. Jarrod saw frustration in the Ecommerce market for CFO services and decide to dive in with his own unique fractional CFO service. Jarrod is passionate about catering to his Ecommerce & D2C clients and helping them achieve their financial growth goals. Outside of work, Jarrod is a husband and father to 4 amazing children living in Nashville, Tennessee in the US.
At CFO Expertise, we cater primarily to high-growth Ecommerce and DTC brands doing $1M–$50M+ in revenue that sell on Shopify and/or Amazon and need financial clarity and cash flow discipline. We're most ideal for founders who are great at sales and brand-building, but want a strategic partner to connect finance, marketing, and ops.
We’re comfortable with QuickBooks Online, Xero, NetSuite, Shopify, Amazon, and more. If you’re already set up somewhere, we can work with it. If not, we’ll help you get there and make sure everything is integrated for smooth reporting. We’re flexible—whatever systems you have in place, we can adapt.
We set up the right chart of accounts, reconcile monthly, and use dashboards to spot trends and issues. Our team double-checks everything before it goes out, and we're always looking for ways to make the data more actionable for you. There are several checks and balances—two reviews before anything gets to your CFO, and then the CFO reviews it. We’re big on process and making sure nothing gets missed.
Yes, we have a partner program with referral fees and discounts. If you’re an agency or service provider, we can work together to support your clients and make sure everyone gets what they need. Just reach out or schedule a call and we’ll walk you through how it works.
Pricing related:
Learn about how pricing works at CFO Expertise, what you can expect with regards to billing, and how we compare to others in the Ecommerce CFO industry.
Most DTC and Ecommerce brands pay between $3k–$10k per month depending on the complexity and scope of CFO work. The right way to look at it is ROI: a good CFO should save you multiples of their fee by preventing mistakes, improving cash flow, and unlocking growth. That's what we aim for at CFO Expertise for all our Ecommerce clients.
Our baseline is full reconciliation—credit cards, bank accounts, making sure nothing is missed. If you want us to enter info into a scorecard or dashboard, we can do that. Higher tiers include monthly analysis, strategy calls, and deeper project work. We can scale up or down depending on what you need. Everything is designed to be flexible and fit your business as it grows.
Our baseline is full reconciliation—credit cards, bank accounts, making sure nothing is missed. If you want us to enter info into a scorecard or dashboard, we can do that. Higher tiers include monthly analysis, strategy calls, and deeper project work. We can scale up or down depending on what you need. Everything is designed to be flexible and fit your business as it grows.
Once you sign up as a CFO Expertise client, you'll be charged for any one-time catchup or cleanup work that's needed (or it will be added into your monthly billing if you requested a payment plan). You'll then be billed on the 1st of each month for the work that will be completed in that month. For example, if you're charged on May 1st, that accounts for your May bookkeeping, accounting, and CFO work. If you want to cancel, we have a 30 days cancellation notice so you'll have 1 more billing after the 30 days notice is given.
The only other fees outside of your monthly CFO pricing plan is for any catchup and/or cleanup work that needs to be completed. This will be determined during the Pricing process and we'll provide you with a separate Pricing Quote for that work.
Additionally, if you have any CFO project work that is outside of the normal scope of services, we will provide you with a quote for that work and you can decide to hire us for it for an additional one time cost.
Services & onboarding:
Browse answers to common questions we receive from Ecommerce founders with regards to our CFO services, the new client onboarding process, and working together on your Ecommerce financials.
We’ll need access to your accounting software (like QuickBooks or Xero), banking, credit card, and sales platforms (Shopify, Amazon, etc.). If you’re not ready to hand over everything, we can start with a review and go from there. Once we execute the agreement, you’ll get an email from us with everything we need. We’ll set up your portal, create a Slack channel (upper tiers only), and start digging in. Expect a lot of communication upfront—we like to over-communicate at the beginning to make sure everything’s right.
All client communication goes directly to your dedicated CFO and Accountant through email, scheduled video calls, Loom videos, and share portals. For our higher tier clients, we also offer communication through Slack. We strive to reply to all questions from clients in 1 business day, and we generally reply within a few hours. Communication is a core pillar of our service and we'll always go above and beyond to make sure we're communicating at a high level.
We deliver accrual-based financials by the 10th of the month, complete with a full KPI dashboard. The finance dashboard includes COGS, contribution margin, CAC, LTV, payback, shipping costs, and overhead trends (depending on what package you sign up for). We'll meet with you to review the financials, provide insights for future growth, and make suggestions based on the data. In addition, we take on financial projects as they come up for one-time fees on top of your monthly package.
This depends on the package that you sign up for. For the majority of our clients, we meet 1-4+ times each month to review financials and work on special projects. For our most basic package, there aren't any scheduled meetings each month. Instead, you receive a monthly video walkthrough of your dashboard from your CFO. Additional meetings can always be purchased for a one-time fee.
We don’t handle tax work for our clients. We always encourage clients to keep their CPA focused on minimizing tax liability, while our job is to make you more profitable. It’s healthy to have some tension between the two roles, so you get the best of both worlds. We're big on checks and balances—your tax accountant looks at things one way, and we look at them another. That way, nothing falls through the cracks.
Absolutely. We love building dashboards that give you a real-time, high-level view of your business—revenue, COGS, gross profit, customer metrics, and more. We’ll look at trends, seasonality, and whatever else matters to your business. If you want to track customer acquisition costs, cohort profitability, or anything else, we can set that up as well.
Yes, that’s a big part of what we do. We’ll help you understand your customer acquisition costs, set pricing strategies, and figure out how aggressive you can get with marketing spend. It’s all about making sure your financials support your growth goals. We’ll help you make sense of the numbers so you can make smarter decisions around marketing and scaling up.
You’ll work with Jarrod Souza or a dedicated CFO for strategy and high-level decisions, and the CFO Expertise team (bookkeepers, accountants, controller) will handle the day-to-day. For accounting-specific questions, you might interact with our Director of Accounting or other specialists on the team. We use Slack, email, and a client portal to keep communication clear. If you ever need to escalate something, you can always reach out to Jarrod or your CFO directly.
Yes, of course! A high percentage of our Ecommerce clients are scaling toward acquisition or private equity. We help you clean up financials, structure your data room, maximize EBITDA, and model valuations. The goal is simple: make you look bulletproof to buyers.
If you’re looking at a transaction or exit, we can get more involved—help with strategy, due diligence, and even meeting with PE firms. If it’s just strategy to get ready for a future exit, that’s included in our normal retainer. If you want us to walk through the whole process with you, we charge 1% of the exit value and we're there every step of the way.