Part-Time CFO in Hong Kong

A great many Hong Kong companies are not really operating businesses. They are holding structures, with the trading, the staff and the problems sitting somewhere else in Asia.

That arrangement is efficient until someone has to answer for the group as a whole. The Hong Kong entity files clean accounts. The operating subsidiary in Thailand, Vietnam or the mainland runs on a different calendar, a different language and a different set of standards. Nobody owns the consolidated picture, and the gaps surface at year end when they are expensive to fix.

The problems a bookkeeper cannot solve

• Intercompany balances between the Hong Kong entity and the operating companies that have never properly tied
• Management fees and licence fees charged between entities with no defensible basis behind them
• An offshore profits claim that depends on facts nobody has documented as they happened
• Subsidiary results arriving late, in local standards, and needing conversion before anyone can read the group position
• A board or an investor asking for numbers the group cannot produce in the form they want them

Each of these is a finance leadership problem. None of them gets better by adding another accountant.

How we handle it

Plizz keeps doing what we are good at: the accounting, the audit coordination, the incorporation and the corporate secretarial work, in Hong Kong and in Thailand.

For the layer above that, we work with SmeCFO, a fractional and interim CFO practice. SmeCFO is itself a Hong Kong registered company, run out of Bangkok, working across Thai, Hong Kong and regional entities for the same owners.

How the two firms are connected

Worth saying plainly, because anyone doing diligence will find it anyway. SmeCFO was founded by Benoit Meneau and Jerome Le Louer, the same two founders as Plizz. Separate companies, separate engagements, separate fees, shared founders.

The separation that matters here is one of function. The person preparing your accounts is not the person interrogating them, and you can engage either firm without the other. If your situation calls for an opinion from someone with no connection to us at all, which is sometimes exactly what a lender or an acquirer wants, tell us and we will refer you out.

What the engagement looks like

Typically two days a month per entity, from USD 3,000. The work sits above your existing accounting arrangements rather than replacing them:

• One reporting pack covering the group rather than a folder of local ones
• Intercompany positions reconciled monthly instead of annually
• Cash and currency exposure across the entities held in one view
• Someone accountable to the owner rather than to any single local team
• Preparation for a raise, a bank facility, a restructuring or a sale

Interim cover

The same practice takes interim CFO roles, which is a different thing. Interim is full attention for a fixed period, usually because someone has left, a transaction is running, or something has gone wrong and needs a senior pair of hands until it is stable. Fractional is a standing arrangement. Ask for the one that matches the situation, and if you are not sure, describe the situation and we will tell you which it is.