Part-Time CFO

When your accountant is doing their job and you still cannot answer the question

Most companies come to Plizz because they want their accounting handled properly. Books that close on time, VAT filed correctly, payroll that runs, and a statutory audit that goes through without drama. That is what we do, and for most businesses it is enough.

Then a question arrives that the accounts cannot answer.

• Should you take the bank loan or bring in an investor?
• Which of your products is actually profitable once overheads are allocated properly?
• Can you afford the next ten hires, and when?
• How will these numbers look to a buyer, a lender, or an investor running due diligence?
• Will the cash hold through a slow quarter?

Those are not accounting questions. They are finance leadership questions, and answering them needs someone who has sat in the CFO seat and made those calls before.

Why we do not simply sell you a CFO

We could. Plenty of firms bolt a CFO service onto an accounting practice, and in most cases it means a senior accountant with a new job title on the proposal.

We would rather introduce you to someone who has actually done the job. For clients who need finance leadership rather than more accounting, we work with SmeCFO, a fractional and interim CFO practice in Bangkok. Jerome Le Louer, who runs the engagements, has held regional CFO roles across Asia and currently holds four finance seats at once, mostly for foreign-owned companies operating in Thailand.

The relationship between the two firms

We would rather you heard this from us than found it later. SmeCFO was founded by Benoit Meneau and Jerome Le Louer, the same two people who founded Plizz. They are separate firms, with separate engagements, separate fees and separate scopes of work, but they share founders and we are not going to pretend otherwise.

What the separation gives you is practical rather than legal. The person answering your strategic questions is not the person preparing your monthly accounts, so a review is an actual review rather than a signature on someone's own work. You can also take one without the other, and clients regularly do.

If what you need is a genuinely independent opinion on figures we prepared, say so plainly. That is a reasonable thing to want, and we will point you to a firm connected to neither of us.

What a part-time CFO actually does

A fractional CFO usually works around two days a month and starts from USD 3,000. They sit above your accounting team rather than replacing it. In practice that means:

• Reviewing what is filed on your behalf, before it is filed
• Building the monthly reporting your board, investors or parent company actually need
• Cash flow forecasting, and telling you early when the forecast changes
• Pricing, margin and cost structure work that the P&L alone will not show you
• Preparing the company for a raise, a loan, or a sale
• Being in the room, or on the call, when a decision has to be made

What this looks like for a foreign-owned company in Thailand

If your company is owned from Europe, the United States or elsewhere in Asia, there are three things that catch owners out here, and none of them are bookkeeping problems.

BOI conditions. Promotion comes with obligations that shape how the finance function has to be built, not only how it reports. Getting that wrong is discovered late and corrected slowly.

Profit repatriation. Moving money out of Thailand to a parent company has a structure to it. Most groups find that out about a year after they assumed the cash would simply move.

The audit requirement. Every company registered in Thailand must be audited annually, regardless of size, and regardless of whether it traded at all. Foreign owners are routinely surprised by this in their first year.

If you are not sure which one you need

Ask us. If the answer is better accounting, that is our job and we will say so. If it is finance leadership, we will make the introduction and step back.