A fractional CFO firm sells judgment by the month. Each client gets a forecast, a monthly close with commentary, a board deck, and a running Slack channel where the founder asks whether they can afford the next hire. The firm's partners have usually seen the same decisions at fifty companies: when to raise, how to price, which metric the board will ask about next. They write that down, in model templates, deck formats, KPI definitions and the commentary that goes with each month's numbers.
Buyers and labs describe this kind of work by name. Troveo lists financial models and valuations, client reports and portfolio reviews, and email tied to reviews. Financial managers are a GDPval occupation and score 100 out of 100 on O*NET's email scale, as do treasurers and controllers. Nyne buys from QuickBooks, Xero and NetSuite.
Most of the numbers, though, are clients' figures, and many of those clients are private companies whose figures were shared under NDA. Troveo's own guide leaves out client identities, account details and anything received under a confidentiality agreement. So the library least tied to any one client comes first: model templates with their logic, deck and KPI formats, close-commentary playbooks, the onboarding diagnostic. Raise every client's financials with the licensing company before anything is exported.
Worth
What a firm's data may be worth
Pre-set for a typical firm: 20 staff and 7 years of records. No buyer publishes pricing by industry, so industry does not move the band. Our estimate, not a buyer quote.
Buyers
Which buyers want this data
Each reason is the buyer's own published statement about the tools, data or industries it takes, matched to how outsourced and fractional CFO firms work.
Featured partners
micro1
Names financial services and professional services and lists templates, playbooks and knowledge bases, which is where a firm's model and deck library lives.10,11
- $100K to $2M+, micro1 says7
Watch out for: Says it removes personal details only "when relevant", so ask exactly how.12
Everyone else we reviewed
By score, with full reviews. We have no referral agreement with these companies, so we do not link out to them.
Nyne AI
Buys from QuickBooks, Xero and NetSuite, the ledgers a fractional CFO team closes each month, and from Asana and Jira where the work is tracked.13
- $100K or more, Nyne says14
Watch out for: Pays only after the dataset is accepted, and publishes no timeline.15
Troveo
Lists financial models and valuations, client reports and email tied to reviews, and starts with a free value assessment before scoping.1,16
- Six figures and up for a whole company, Troveo says17
- A share of the revenue; the percentage is not published18
Watch out for: You are paid from a revenue share, so ask what percentage you keep.18
Buyer demand
How buyers' own tools rate outsourced and fractional CFO firms
No buyer publishes a price list by industry. These are settings inside buyers' and brokers' own estimators and intake forms, read from their public pages on 2026-10-14. They show how each company sorts industries, not what any firm was paid. The category shown is the one a firm would most likely pick; that match is ours.
| Company | Its category | How it rates the industry |
|---|---|---|
| Troveo | Accounting, tax or bookkeeping | Tier 1 of 4: "Buyers pay a premium for data from your industry." Price factor 1.3 in its estimator.19 |
| Polyshares | Accounting and tax | Marked premium in its intake list20 |
| VMS | Accounting | Standard weight in its estimator (factor 1.12)21 |
| Ventra | Legal, healthcare, financial services or accounting | Says it cannot take these industries right now22 |
Size rules buyers publish
Checked against 20 staff, the typical firm size this page's calculator is set to. Ask each buyer whether contractors and part-time staff count.
Polyshares
No headcount rule; the length and texture of the record matter more23
Mercor
None stated24
Troveo
No minimum stated; its estimator starts at 2025
Nyne
20+ US W-2 employees and 3+ years26
Handshake AI
20+ full-time employees and 3+ years27
micro1
Pewter
20+ staff and 3+ years30
Endless
Roughly 30+ employees31
Ventra
30+ US employees and 3+ years of records32
Supersoniq
50+ employees and 5+ years33
What buyers value
What in a firm's records buyers value
The column on the right is not legal advice: it lists what to raise with the buyer before anything is exported.
| Data | Where it lives | Why a buyer values it | Raise with the buyer |
|---|---|---|---|
| Forecast and model templates | Excel, Google Sheets, Causal or Jirav | Three-statement and SaaS models with the firm's driver logic, refined across many clients. | Copies of templates that still hold a client's figures. |
| Board deck and KPI formats | Google Slides, PowerPoint | Which metrics the firm shows a board, in what order, and how each is defined. | Nothing specific |
| Month-end commentary playbook | Docs, Notion | How the firm turns a variance into a two-line explanation a founder can act on. | Commentary written about a named client's month. |
| Client Slack channels | Slack, shared channels | Founders' questions answered in real time: hiring, runway, pricing, fundraising. | Every client's figures and plans inside those channels. |
| Onboarding diagnostic and cleanup checklist | Shared drive, project tool | The first-month review of a new client's books and systems, run the same way every time. | Nothing specific |
| Fundraising and diligence support kits | Docs, data-room checklists | The firm's request lists and model walkthroughs for investor diligence. | Investor names and terms from client rounds. |
A week of records
A week of data at a firm
- Monday: close commentary drafted for 14 clients from the variance playbook.
- Tuesday: a founder asks in Slack whether to hire two engineers or extend runway; the partner answers with a scenario.
- Wednesday: the SaaS model template gets a new churn-cohort tab after three clients asked for it.
- Thursday: a board deck goes out in the firm's standard format with two new KPIs.
- Friday: a new client's books go through the onboarding diagnostic; 23 cleanup items logged.
Process
How it works with each buyer
In each buyer's own published words. Where a buyer publishes nothing, we say so rather than guess.
micro1
- Internal docs, SOPs and playbooks, knowledge bases, project management workflows, internal comms, templates, CRM and workflow metadata, task histories11
- 30 to 200 employees29
- $100K-$2M+ per data package; over $1M for unique data7
- PII removed "when relevant"12
- The company keeps ownership of its data and reviews samples before release34
- Not published
Nyne AI
Selling or closing
Selling or closing your firm? License its data first
Fractional CFO firms are young, and many are being rolled up by larger accounting and advisory groups. When a partner group sells, the model and deck library is usually what the buyer wants most and prices least. Ask each licensing company whether that library can be licensed before the deal, separately from client files. Buyers approach companies around transactions already: Mercor went to Warmly about its archives after HubSpot acquired it.3
FAQ
Outsourced and fractional CFO firms: questions, answered
We do not answer legal questions. Ask the licensing company: their team reviews this with you before anything is signed.
We do not answer legal questions. Ask the licensing company: their team reviews this with you before anything is signed.
We do not answer legal questions. Ask the licensing company: their team reviews this with you before anything is signed.
Before you sign
Legal questions go to the licensing company
We do not answer legal questions. Ask the licensing company before you sign: their team reviews these with you.
Questions for this kind of business
- How will client figures, names and investor terms be removed from models and channels?
- Do client engagement terms assign deliverables such as models and decks to the client?
- How does your review handle the GLBA Safeguards Rule for client financial data?
- Who owns this data: the company, an estate, or someone else?
- How do CCPA, GDPR, UK GDPR and state privacy laws apply, and is de-identified data still personal information?
- Do customer, vendor or platform contracts, NDAs or API terms restrict this?
Questions for any buyer
- Is the license exclusive, and for how long?
- Can you sublicense the data, and to whom?
- Which AI labs will receive it, and will you tell us?
- How long do you keep it, and how is it deleted?
- What is your liability cap, and who indemnifies whom?
- Will the contract ban re-identification of people in the data?
- Who removes personal data, by what method, and do we approve it first?