CFO Benchmarking: Finance Function Cost, Staffing & Systems

For CFOs at PE-backed and growth-stage companies, CFO benchmarking is one of the sharpest, and most underused, tools available. When investors enter a business, they don’t just evaluate the product or the market opportunity. They evaluate the finance function: its cost structure, its output quality, its ability to scale. CFOs who walk in without benchmarks are guessing. Those who have them are already making the case.

The benchmarks that matter most aren’t obvious until you’ve been through the investor gauntlet once or twice. Consero’s 2022 CFO survey — conducted with Wakefield Research across 100 CFOs at PE-backed software and business services companies with $10M–$200M in revenue — surfaced a set of findings that challenge some common assumptions about how finance functions should be sized, costed, and structured.

Jack McCullough, President of the CFO Leadership Council, helped put those findings in context. What follows are the lessons worth taking away.

The short answer: A well-run finance function at a $10M–$25M company should cost closer to 2–3% of revenue — not the 10% CFOs often assume — and the cost should decrease as a percentage of revenue as the company grows. Getting there requires the right staffing model, realistic timelines for systems implementation, and a structural shift in how the CFO spends time.

CFO Benchmarking Starts With the Cost of the Finance Function

When Consero asked CFOs what the finance and accounting function should cost as a percentage of revenue for a $10M company, the median response landed around 10%. Consero’s own benchmarking across clients in the $10M–$25M revenue range showed actual spend closer to 3%, and among top-performing clients, as low as 2%. The gap between what CFOs assume is acceptable and what well-run finance functions actually cost is wide — and it matters, because investors evaluate overhead efficiency from day one of due diligence.

McCullough’s reaction when he saw the 10% figure was similar. For most companies, spending $1M on finance and accounting when you’re doing $10M in revenue represents a significant drag — one that compounds as the business scales. The better-run the function, the lower that percentage becomes over time, not higher.

Two-thirds of surveyed CFOs agreed: as a company grows from $10M to $200M, the finance and accounting cost as a percentage of revenue should decrease or stay constant. Half said it should decrease. That’s the right instinct — but achieving it requires building the function correctly from the start, not just hoping headcount stays lean.

Revenue Range	Surveyed CFOs’ Assumed Benchmark	Consero Client Actual Average	Top-Quartile Consero Clients
$10M revenue	~10% of revenue	~3% of revenue	~2% of revenue
$25M–$200M revenue	Should stay constant or decrease	Decreases with scale	~1–1.5% of revenue (best-in-class)

These benchmarks include everything: people, software, and process. When Consero does a finance function assessment for a PE firm’s portfolio, the analysis covers the full stack — whether back-office workflows are automated, whether the systems are integrated, whether the headcount reflects the actual work being done or reflects underinvestment in technology that forces more people to do manual tasks.

Headcount Is Not the Right Measure of a Finance Function’s Strength

The surveyed CFOs also answered a question about ideal team size: for a $10M company, most said 10 or fewer staff members in finance and accounting. That’s not wrong, but it’s not the most useful frame. Headcount is a proxy for cost and capacity — what matters is what that headcount is doing. A team of eight people manually reconciling transactions in spreadsheets is more expensive and less reliable than a team of three using automated workflows and integrated systems.

The more useful benchmark is whether the finance team’s composition matches the company’s actual stage and needs. McCullough observed that for companies under $25M in revenue, the top finance person is often a controller, with a fractional or outsourced CFO providing strategic oversight — sometimes as few as four to eight hours per week. That structure works when the operational foundation is solid enough that the CFO doesn’t need to be in the weeds. When it isn’t solid, the CFO ends up managing firefighting instead of strategy, which is the more common scenario.

Consero’s benchmarking across its client base aligns with a Robert Half study that suggested companies under $25M in revenue need roughly three finance and accounting people on staff. The key phrase is “on staff” — that number assumes some level of external support handling the more transactional work, which keeps the internal team focused on higher-value output. When companies try to staff everything internally without that support structure, they tend to over-hire for the wrong things and under-invest in the systems that would make those hires more productive.

The Things That Destroy Deal Value Are Rarely Dramatic

The survey asked CFOs about the consequences of a poorly run finance function, and the responses carried real weight. CFOs who have been through PE-backed situations — especially near exit — don’t need to be told abstractly that finance quality matters. They’ve seen it go wrong.

The most common consequences weren’t dramatic failures. They were operational: the inability to make strategic investments because leadership couldn’t trust the data coming out of the organization, AR and AP breakdowns that disrupted cash flow, and the inability to raise debt or equity quickly because the books couldn’t withstand scrutiny on short notice. The underlying issue in each case is the same — the finance function had become a liability rather than an asset, and the company had no mechanism for getting clean data fast.

“If you don’t have good data and you can’t trust the data as one single source of truth coming out of the organization, obviously it’s impossible to make those strategic decisions and investments.” — Bartley O’Dwyer, Consero Global

McCullough added a dimension that doesn’t show up in most CFO benchmarking discussions: reputational exposure. Customers and suppliers increasingly run their own financial diligence on vendors. A company with sloppy books isn’t just at risk during a formal transaction — it’s a risk in every commercial relationship it holds. That’s a consequence that compounds quietly until it becomes acute.

The most illustrative example from the conversation was a PE-backed company that had reached a signed term sheet on a sale, only to have the deal collapse during diligence when it emerged that federal income tax returns hadn’t been filed in five years. The CFO was experienced. The situation had developed anyway. The cost wasn’t just the deal — it was the timing. The company was now in a different economic environment, with a materially weaker position for any future exit attempt.

“You know it’s a very so the consequences of getting the F&A and the org structure wrong are just absolutely — can be disastrous for both a career and for the sale of an asset.” — Bartley O’Dwyer, Consero Global

McCullough offered a parallel example: a company that had allowed substandard valuation work to proceed through multiple audit cycles. When the company tried to go public, the underwriters rejected the valuations. The company switched auditors, spent years redoing the work from scratch, and by the time the books were clean, the IPO window had closed. Five years later, they still hadn’t gone public.

CFO Benchmarking Confirms What Every Finance Leader Feels: Time on Strategy Is the Scarcest Resource

The survey asked CFOs how their time should be divided between strategic planning and day-to-day operations. The response was consistent and unsurprising: most believe they should be spending the majority of their time on strategy. The reality, as McCullough put it, is that there’s always a structural reason why that doesn’t happen — and the most persistent one is talent.

Consero’s survey found that CFOs spend roughly one-third of their working week on hiring, recruiting, training, and evaluating the finance team. That figure predates the widespread talent shortages that followed, which have only made the problem worse. When a CFO can’t find or retain a competent controller, the work doesn’t stop — it just flows upward. The CFO becomes the de facto controller, and strategic planning becomes a weekend activity.

McCullough made the point plainly: unless you’re at one of the rare companies where the CEO is a former CFO, you’re the only financial expert at the executive table. Your participation in every material strategic decision isn’t a nice-to-have — it’s structurally necessary. When talent shortages prevent that participation, the whole organization is operating at a deficit, not just the finance function.

The response most consistently endorsed in the survey for addressing this wasn’t heroic hiring — it was investment in technology and automation, paired with a realistic acceptance that full staffing may not be achievable. McCullough’s framing was direct:

“It’s imperative now that you invest in technologies, automation, artificial intelligence — whatever it might be — accepting the reality that you’re never going to have the staff that you think that you really need to have.” — Jack McCullough, CFO Leadership Council

That’s a harder mindset shift than it sounds. Most finance leaders were trained in a world where more staff meant more capacity. The adjustment is recognizing that capacity now comes from systems and automation as much as from headcount, and that a lean, well-supported team with the right tools often outperforms a larger team running on manual processes.

Systems Implementations Always Take Longer Than the Plan — Plan Accordingly

Among all the survey findings, one of the most consistent was this: 88% of CFOs said they underestimated the time required to complete a financial systems implementation or ERP migration. Only 12% said they didn’t — and McCullough’s reaction was that the 12% were probably being generous with themselves.

The consistent failure mode is organizational. Finance and accounting teams can’t pause their day-to-day responsibilities to run a parallel implementation. The same people closing the books each month are also the ones configuring the new system, running parallel processes, and troubleshooting data migration issues. Implementation timelines don’t account for that friction honestly, and CFOs who haven’t been through it before tend to take the project plan at face value.

Somebody early in my career told me a couple of rules about ERP implementations. Rule number one is it takes about twice as long as you think it will. And rule number two was it still takes twice as long as you think it will, even when you consider rule number one.” — Jack McCullough, CFO Leadership Council

McCullough also identified a failure pattern that goes beyond timeline: implementations that don’t have genuine cross-functional buy-in tend to fail or drag. When an ERP project is treated as a finance and accounting initiative rather than a company-wide strategic investment, the resistance is predictable. The system touches every part of the business — sales operations, procurement, HR — and if those teams aren’t aligned from the start, every integration decision becomes a negotiation.

For PE-backed companies, the timeline risk is compounded by investor expectations. A CFO who needs 15 months to get the systems in order is a CFO who can’t support a diligence process or an add-on acquisition during that window. Consero’s implementation experience — built across hundreds of engagements — compresses that timeline significantly, but the broader lesson holds for any implementation: the plan is wrong. Build in the buffer before you commit to the board.

• Treat the implementation timeline estimate as a floor, not a target.
• Staff the project team separately from the team running day-to-day operations — or they’ll end up doing both badly.
• Secure explicit buy-in from the CEO and board before kickoff. Implementations that are “just a finance project” don’t get the priority they need when things slow down.
• Define what “done” looks like before you start. Scope creep is the most common driver of overruns.
• Consider whether a Finance as a Service model removes the implementation burden entirely — the platform arrives pre-built, and the timeline compresses to 30–90 days.

Put Your Finance Function to the Test

If the benchmarks in this article surfaced questions about your own finance function — what it costs, how it’s staffed, whether it could survive diligence tomorrow — those questions are worth answering before a transaction forces the issue. Consero works with PE-backed and growth-stage companies to assess the finance function against benchmarks, identify the gaps, and build a plan for closing them.

The assessment is free, takes a few hours, and gives you a clear picture of where you stand. Schedule your free finance assessment and find out what the numbers actually say.