Cash Flow Forecasting, Fractional vs. Interim CFO, and AI Workflow Automation
in Interviews, Cash Flow Management, CFO Pro+Analytics, CFO Services, Fractional CFO Services, All Posts
On the Growth Capital Podcast, host Justin Dixon talks with Salvatore Tirabassi, Founder and Managing Director of CFO Pro+Analytics, about how a fractional CFO actually engages, when a business owner should start the conversation, and where AI and Excel automation are quietly making finance teams faster.
Table of Contents
-
The Typical Engagement: Cash Flow First, Then Driver-Based Forecasting
-
Why “Plus Analytics” — and the Case for the CFO as Chief Data Officer
-
Yellow Flags: When a Founder Should Talk to a Fractional CFO
Justin Dixon: Give the audience a little overview of who you are and what you’re up to.
Salvatore Tirabassi: Salvatore Tirabassi, Founder and Managing Director of CFO Pro+Analytics. We’re a boutique CFO services firm offering fractional and interim CFO services to family and founder-owned businesses. I’ve got a team of about seven people. There’s a lot of talent out there with really good CFO capabilities, and we can deliver services in a very cost-effective manner to companies that normally don’t have access to these capabilities.
Justin Dixon: What are some of your niches?
Salvatore Tirabassi: We’re actually industry-agnostic. We’ve got businesses in SaaS, CPG, construction, fund management, asset managers—a variety of business models. We try to be very consultative at the outset to really understand how their business model works, then we match talent capability with the company.
Justin Dixon: What’s a typical engagement look like?
Salvatore Tirabassi: Typically we roll right into cash flow planning. We go right into a weekly cash flow model for most of these clients. Then we’ll build a monthly financial forecast that’s driver-based. It’s a private-equity-grade financial projection that gives them a very detailed understanding of their business.
As part of both of those, accounting and reporting automatically get wrapped in. If you’re going to build these tools, you end up digging into the accounting, which most of the time is pretty messy and needs care. Even if you’re a family-owned business looking for an SBA loan, it’s much more powerful going in with a projection and prepared financial statements rather than just tax returns.
Justin Dixon: What about prep-for-sale work?
Salvatore Tirabassi: To define the terms: fractional is permanent part-time. We’re part of your team, the main advisor to the CEO and owner. Interim is the inverse—temporary full-time.
On the interim side, we’ve been brought in by investment banks working with businesses that have never prepared formal financial statements. We might spend 90 to 120 days systematizing the finance function so the bank has a much easier pitch when selling to private equity. We also step in for private equity firms that need support while searching for a permanent full-time CFO.
Justin Dixon: I was curious about the name—CFO Pro+Analytics.
Salvatore Tirabassi: When you get into the forward-looking game in this day and age, it’s all analytics-driven. Strategic finance, financial forecasting, and reporting are all driver-based. That’s where the “plus analytics” comes in. We’ve got clients that buy business intelligence services as part of the package.
My view is that a really good CFO could actually also be the Chief Data Officer—where all the data is owned by the finance function and pushed out to the rest of the organization. I ran the business that way when I was a full-time CFO, and I’ve packaged that knowhow into this service.
Justin Dixon: What are some yellow flags that should guide a founder to think, “I might need some CFO support”?
Salvatore Tirabassi: If you’re doing $5 million of revenue, you should be thinking about it. I could make an argument that if you’re doing $3 million, you should be thinking about it. If you’ve got questions about your financial future and don’t have the time or expertise to figure them out, or if you recognize that more financial insights would help you grow, have the conversation.
If you’re spending too much time assessing whether you’re actually making money, or if you’ve botched a lender pitch because you didn’t present the data correctly, those are all indicators.
Justin Dixon: Are senior CFOs interested in being fractional later in their careers?
Salvatore Tirabassi: Two things happened since COVID. First, everyone’s mind opened up to video communications—I don’t need to be in your office every day to be effective. Second, the fractional market became more formalized. Senior talent can work on three or four different clients a month and work directly with the CEO, which offers more flexibility and variety than a single full-time role.
Justin Dixon: Are you guys leveraging AI tools?
Salvatore Tirabassi: I’m an early adopter. AI doesn’t necessarily eliminate people, but it makes things more repeatable, efficient, and reliable.
Where AI really becomes powerful is when you integrate agents like Claude or ChatGPT through workflow tools like Zapier, Make, or n8n. You can set a trigger: “Whenever I produce a new invoice in QuickBooks, I want Claude to transform that data and dump it into a Google Sheet I can view on my phone.” It’s the “glue” that brings intelligence together with your data repositories.
Salvatore Tirabassi: I use Claude a lot for cleaning data. For example, I can ask Claude to write the Power Query code to transform raw data into a specific format, and it usually gets it right in a few attempts.
On the other hand, Microsoft’s Copilot inside Excel is becoming a game-changer. You can have a table of credit card expenses and simply prompt Copilot to “add a column that categorizes these by vendor.” It scans the sheet and makes intelligent lists for you.
Justin Dixon: Financial data is sensitive. Is there a way to make this less risky?
Salvatore Tirabassi: You must use a paid version and you must move the slider over to “don’t use my data for training.” That is the price of admission. Move the slider over. Pay the $20 or $30 a month. Anthropic (Claude) and OpenAI (ChatGPT) have different agreements, but generally, the paid/enterprise tiers allow you to opt out of data training.
Justin Dixon: If people want to reach out, what’s the best way?
Salvatore Tirabassi: Connect with me on the website—cfoproanalytics.com. Or find me on LinkedIn — Salvatore Tirabassi. I’m pretty good at responding and happy to connect.
Salvatore Tirabassi is the Founder of CFOPro+Analytics, providing fractional CFO services to growth-stage companies. Based in New York, he leverages over 24 years of experience in venture capital and strategic finance to help entrepreneurs master cash flow, unit economics, and equity value creation through data-driven financial clarity.
