SERVICE · SINGAPORE
CFO-level judgement, without the CFO salary.
When a decision is big enough to change the shape of the business — a new market, a senior hire, a price change, a raise — you need someone who has seen the numbers behind it, not just the numbers themselves. Our agents turn your books into scenarios and packs; your named accountant brings the judgement, in the room when it matters.
Facts checked on 12 September 2026
WHAT THIS COVERS
The work, in plain terms.
A bookkeeper and an accountant tell you what has already happened: the transactions are recorded, the accounts reconcile, the return is filed. A CFO looks the other way — forward, at the decision in front of you — and asks what the numbers say you should do about it. That is a different job. It is about capital, not compliance: whether you can afford the hire, what the price change does to margin, whether the expansion pays for itself, what a lender or an investor will actually ask before they say yes. It is the difference between an accurate record of the business and an opinion about where the business should go next, and a growing company needs both.
A Singapore SME rarely justifies a full-time CFO, and does not need one every day of the week. What they need is fractional access to that judgement — someone who knows the business well enough to have an opinion, available when a decision is on the table, without carrying a full-time salary on the payroll every month of the year regardless of whether there is a decision to make. The value sits in the moments that matter: the hire, the price change, the raise, the sale — not in a permanent seat at a desk between them.
That is only affordable because of how the work is split. Agents do the preparation that would otherwise eat the hours of a CFO or the owner: building scenario models, pulling the unit economics apart, assembling the board pack or the bank pack from your reconciled numbers. Your accountant does not spend the session building the spreadsheet — the spreadsheet is already built when the conversation starts. What you are buying by the hour is the judgement on top of it: the recommendation, the trade-offs, the presence in the room where the decision actually gets made. Because the preparation is already done, the conversation with your accountant is a conversation about the decision itself, not a status update on how far the analysis has got.
WHO IT'S FOR
Built for SMEs like these.
Facing a decision bigger than the day-to-day
You are weighing a new market, a senior hire, or a price change, and you want the numbers modelled properly before you commit — not a gut call made under pressure with the accounts open in another tab. You want someone who can hold the whole picture — margin, cash, headcount — in view at once, rather than one spreadsheet at a time.
Raising or borrowing
You are approaching a bank or an EnterpriseSG scheme, or talking to investors, and you need forecasts, management accounts and a use-of-funds story that hold up to questions, not just a number you would like to receive. You want the application built properly, drawing on forecasts and management accounts that are already in good order.
Preparing for sale or investment
A buyer or investor is going to look at your accounts and your filings, and you want them ready — reconciled, explained, and free of the kind of mess that turns a straightforward conversation into a renegotiation. You want the three years of history behind you to read as a coherent story, not a set of loose ends.
THE SINGAPORE RULES
What the regulator expects.
Advisory itself is not regulated the way a filing is — there is no statutory return for a pricing decision or a hiring plan. But the decisions this service informs run straight into rules that are enforced, and getting the advice right means understanding what those rules require before you act on it. A recommendation that ignores the obligations sitting behind it is not a complete recommendation, whatever the model behind it says.
Financing, fundraising, related-party arrangements and a future sale each carry their own obligations, mostly falling on the directors and the company rather than on any adviser. The table below sets out what applies to each, so that the strategy your accountant recommends is one you can actually execute without a compliance problem attached to it. Knowing these obligations in advance also shapes the advice itself — a plan built around a grant, a raise or a related-party arrangement is only as good as its ability to satisfy the rules that come with it.
| Requirement | What applies |
|---|---|
| Financing | Bank facilities and EnterpriseSG scheme applications both need forecasts, management accounts and a clear use of funds before they are submitted. |
| Grants | The Enterprise Development Grant and similar schemes require a project plan and projections submitted up front, and claims made against the grant are audited afterwards against what was actually delivered. |
| Raising equity | Share issues and any change in shareholding must be lodged with ACRA within 14 days. Term sheets carry tax and control consequences beyond the headline valuation, and those need to be understood before signing, not after. |
| Directors' duties | Decisions have to be made in the company's interest and with proper information in front of the directors making them, under section 157 of the Companies Act. A recommendation is only useful if it gives directors that information. |
| Related-party dealings | IRAS expects arm's-length terms between related parties, with transfer-pricing documentation required above thresholds. Any advisory that touches inter-company pricing has to account for this. |
| Due diligence | Buyers and investors expect clean, reconciled accounts and filings for at least three years. Advisory work aimed at a future sale or raise is work toward passing that scrutiny. |
HOW WE HANDLE IT
Step by step, every period.
- 01
Diagnostic
Before any recommendation, the agent lays out what the numbers say now: margin by product or client, cash runway, headcount cost against revenue, trend over the last several quarters. This is the baseline every subsequent conversation is measured against, built once and kept current so it does not have to be rebuilt each time a new decision appears.
- 02
Question framing
A vague worry — 'should we hire' — gets turned into the decision you actually need to make: at what revenue does this hire pay for itself, and what happens to cash if it takes longer than planned. Framing the question well shapes everything that follows, because a poorly framed question produces an analysis that answers the wrong thing.
- 03
Analysis
Agents build the scenarios: best case, base case, downside case, each with the unit economics behind it, formatted into the board pack or bank pack the audience actually needs to see, drawn from your reconciled numbers rather than a fresh spreadsheet built from scratch for the occasion.
- 04
Advice
Your accountant reviews the scenarios and gives a recommendation, including the trade-offs the numbers alone do not show — what you are giving up by choosing one path over another, and what would have to be true for the analysis to be wrong. This is the part of the process a model cannot do on its own.
- 05
Follow-through
Where it matters, your accountant is in the room — with a bank, an investor, a buyer — able to answer questions on the numbers directly, plus a quarterly strategy session to revisit the plan against what actually happened since the last one, and adjust the recommendation as the business moves on from it.
AGENTS + ACCOUNTANT
Who does what.
Advisory work has the same two halves as everything else Synergy Accounting does, just at a higher altitude. Building a scenario model, assembling a board pack, formatting a bank submission from the reconciled books — that is volume and structure, and agents do it faster and more consistently than a person rebuilding a spreadsheet from scratch each time. Deciding what the scenarios mean, which trade-off to recommend, and what to say when a bank or an investor pushes back — that needs a person who understands the business and carries the judgement. Paying for the judgement by the hour, with the preparation already done, is what makes CFO-level thinking affordable without a CFO-level salary on the payroll.
- Prepare scenario models and board or bank packs
- Pull the numbers behind any question you ask
- Advises on pricing, margins, hiring and financing
- Joins key conversations with banks and investors
WHAT GOES WRONG WITHOUT IT
The expensive mistakes.
Pricing by competitor rather than margin
Matching a competitor's price without knowing your own margin at that price point can turn a growing sales line into a shrinking one. Pricing decisions need your unit economics on the table, not just what the market appears to be charging — the competitor may be carrying costs, or a strategy, that your business does not share.
Hiring ahead of cash
A senior hire is a fixed cost from the first payslip, whether or not the revenue it was meant to unlock arrives on schedule. Without a cash runway model behind the decision, a good hire can still be the thing that forces a cutback, undoing the very growth the hire was meant to support.
Raising money without knowing what it costs
A term sheet or a facility looks attractive until the control, tax and repayment consequences are worked through properly. Money raised without understanding what it costs — not just in interest, but in control given up — can constrain the business more than the problem it was meant to solve, long after the funds have been spent.
Going into a sale or investment with messy books
A buyer or investor who finds unreconciled accounts or gaps in filings does not just ask more questions — they price the uncertainty into the deal, or walk away from it. Clean books prepared well ahead of the conversation protect the value you are trying to realise, rather than handing that value away in the negotiation.
WHAT YOU RECEIVE
CFO-level guidance without a CFO salary.
- A quarterly strategy session with your named accountant, revisiting the plan against what actually happened since the last one
- Scenario models built from your reconciled numbers, covering the best, base and downside case for the decision in front of you
- Board packs and bank packs formatted for the audience reading them, not a generic export of the same figures
- Pricing and margin analysis behind any pricing decision, so the recommendation is grounded in your own unit economics
- Support preparing financing and grant applications, including the forecasts and use-of-funds detail lenders and scheme administrators ask for
- Your accountant's presence in key conversations with banks, investors or buyers, able to answer questions on the numbers directly
INCLUDED IN YOUR PACKAGE
Included from the Fractional Finance Team package.
Senior finance leadership, on demand. Every package is a fixed monthly fee with a named accountant on your file — see what each one includes and choose the right starting point.
Common questions.
How is this different from an accountant?
An accountant reports what has happened and keeps you compliant. This service looks forward: it uses your numbers to help you decide what to do next — whether to hire, raise, expand or change your pricing — and puts a senior accountant's judgement behind that decision, not just the historical record behind it. The two services draw on the same reconciled books, but the question each one answers is different.
How much time do I get?
A quarterly strategy session is built into the service, and your accountant is available for the decisions that come up between sessions. Exactly how that time is used depends on what is in front of the business at the time — some quarters are quiet, others need more attention, and the session itself is the structured moment to step back from day-to-day numbers.
Can you join investor or bank meetings?
Yes. Follow-through in key conversations with banks, investors or buyers is part of the process — your accountant attends able to answer questions on the numbers directly, having built the model and the pack behind the recommendation being discussed, so the person answering questions is the same person who prepared the analysis behind them.
Do you help with grants?
Yes. Financing and grant support includes help preparing the project plan and projections that schemes such as the Enterprise Development Grant require, and keeping the numbers behind a claim consistent with what is submitted, since claims are audited afterwards against what was actually delivered under the grant.
Can this be ad hoc?
The quarterly strategy session is the baseline, but advisory does not have to wait for the calendar. A big decision — a hire, a price change, an approach from an investor — can be brought to your accountant as it comes up, rather than held until the next scheduled session, because the numbers behind it are already current.
How do agents fit into advisory?
Agents do the preparation: building the scenario models, pulling unit economics from your reconciled books, assembling the board or bank pack. That means the conversation with your accountant starts from a finished analysis, and the time you pay for goes to the recommendation, not to building the spreadsheet the recommendation is based on.
Need this handled?
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