How much does a virtual CFO cost in India?

Search for virtual CFO pricing in India and you will often find the words “contact us for a quote”. That makes it hard to know whether a VCFO is even worth a phone call. So here are our actual prices, what sits behind them, and how to judge any VCFO fee — ours or anyone else’s — against the alternative of hiring.

Our prices, in full

Engagement	From, per month	What it covers
Bookkeeping	₹20,000	Clean, current records and a reviewed trial balance
Outsourced accounting	₹45,000	The whole accounting function, monthly statements, MIS pack, GST and TDS returns
Virtual CFO	₹90,000	Everything in outsourced accounting, plus cash forecasting, budgets, margin analysis, lender and investor readiness, and a monthly review with you

These are starting points. The final fee is fixed per month, agreed in writing after we have seen your actual volumes, and doesn’t rise because you picked up the phone. If your books are behind, catching up is quoted separately as a one-time clean-up, so you can see exactly what you are paying for. The full breakdown is on our pricing page.

What the fee actually buys

A virtual CFO engagement has three layers, and a fee is only comparable if you know which ones it includes.

1. The accounting underneath. Books closed and reconciled every month. Without this, everything above it is built on sand.
2. The reporting. A monthly MIS pack: P&L against budget, cash, receivables, margins and the handful of operating numbers that matter to you.
3. The judgement. The rolling cash forecast, the pricing and margin work, the budget, the conversation with your bank or investor, and a monthly review where the numbers turn into decisions.

Some VCFO quotes cover only the third layer and assume your existing team delivers the first two, on time and correctly. If that assumption fails, you pay a CFO’s rate for someone to chase your bookkeeper.

What moves the fee

• Transaction volume. The number of invoices, bills and bank lines each month. A trading business with 900 transactions a month is a different job from a consultancy with 40.
• Entities and GSTINs. Each legal entity needs its own books and close; each state registration adds its own returns and reconciliation.
• The state of the books today. Current, reconciled books cost less to run than ones that need rebuilding every month.
• Reporting depth. A standard monthly pack costs less than margin reporting by product, branch and channel.
• Senior time. A monthly review call is a lighter engagement than a CFO in the room through a fundraise or a lender negotiation.

Against a full-time hire

The comparison that matters isn’t one VCFO firm against another. It is a VCFO against hiring your own finance head. Salary is the number everyone looks at, and it is never the whole cost. Add:

• Employment costs. Employer PF contribution, gratuity provision and any performance bonus.
• Hiring. A recruiter’s fee, months of search, and the ramp-up period before a new hire knows your business.
• The team underneath. A CFO doesn’t do the bookkeeping. You still need, and pay for, the people who do.
• Tools. Accounting, reporting and forecasting software licences.
• The risk of getting it wrong. A mis-hire in the most senior finance seat is expensive to discover and expensive to unwind.

A worked illustration, with figures you should replace with your own: if the finance head you would hire costs ₹3,00,000 a month in salary, the cost to the business is well above that once the items above are added — before a single rupee is spent on the accountants they will need. A ₹90,000 retainer that includes the accounting is a different order of magnitude.

That doesn’t make a VCFO right for everyone. A business with complex operations that needs someone on site every day will eventually need its own CFO. The honest answer is that a VCFO is usually right for years, not forever — and when the time comes to hire, clean books and a working reporting cycle make that hire far more productive from day one.

Questions to ask before you sign

1. Who actually does the work? The person on the sales call, or a junior you will meet later?
2. Is the accounting included? If not, who closes the books, and by when each month?
3. What exactly arrives each month, and on what date? Ask to see a sample reporting pack.
4. Is the fee fixed? What would make it change, and how much notice would you get?
5. What is out of scope? A good firm will tell you clearly what it doesn’t do.
6. How do you leave? Notice period, and how your data and files come back to you.

When it isn’t worth paying for

• You are pre-revenue. What you need is a bookkeeper and a bank account, not a forecast of numbers that don’t exist yet.
• Your only need is filing returns. That is compliance work, and paying a CFO rate for it is waste.
• You need something signed or certified. Audits, certificates and attest reports are CA-reserved work. OFS employs qualified CAs but is not a CA firm, and we don’t do it.

If any of those describes you, we will say so on the first call. For everyone else, when to hire a virtual CFO covers the triggers that usually mean the time has come, and our virtual CFO service page sets out what the retainer includes.