Patchwork spreadsheets, manual reporting, a drowning finance team and board packs that don't land. Stratum diagnoses how your finance function actually works, rebuilds it, then runs it with you or hands it clean to your next senior hire.
Every scaling company hits this point. The signs are always the same.
Month-end takes weeks, numbers get questioned in the board meeting, and nobody fully trusts the model.
Capable people spend their week on manual pulls, copy-paste reporting and rework instead of analysis.
Metrics live in five spreadsheets and three tools. Every report starts from scratch.
The deck and board pack describe the business, but they don't tell its story or survive diligence.
Hiring a senior finance leader into this doesn't fix it. They inherit the mess and spend six months cleaning it up. Fix the function first.
Every engagement follows the same arc: understand the function as it really operates, rebuild it, then run the cadence it deserves.
A fixed-fee, two-to-three week review of what your finance team actually does: every task, every data source, every report. You get a data lineage map, a critical assessment of what's needed versus habit, and a prioritised fix list.
Finance Function Diagnostic · fixed feeA 60 to 90 day transformation sprint. Processes streamlined and automated, your team upskilled so the gains stick, reporting rebuilt into a genuine storytelling asset, and a Power BI layer over a clean data model.
Transformation Sprint · outcome-scopedEither Stratum stays on as your fractional strategic finance partner, running forecasting, scenarios and board reporting on retainer, or we hand a clean, documented function to the senior hire you always planned to make.
Retainer, or pre-hire handoverThe full picture of how your finance function operates today and exactly what to fix, in priority order.
Processes, data flows, reporting and team capability rebuilt end-to-end so the function scales with the company.
We clean up before your Head of Finance or CFO starts, so your hire walks into a working function, not a salvage job.
Senior capacity when your finance lead leaves, goes on leave, or a raise lands on an already stretched team.
FP&A, driver-based modelling, scenario analysis, board and investor reporting. A senior finance partner, without the $300k hire.
Investor-grade model, a deck that tells your story, and a data room built to survive diligence.
Stratum is led by a Chartered Accountant CA(SA) who has performed this exact transformation repeatedly inside scaling companies: as the operator, not the advisor. You work with the person who has done the job.
Driver-based three-statement models, scenario analysis and runway maths that boards actually use.
Power BI and Excel models built on clean schemas and proper transformations, not charts sitting on top of messy exports. Most fractional CFOs read the data. Stratum structures it first.
Board packs and pitch decks treated as narrative devices, on brand, every time. Brand Finance is a philosophy here, not a slide template.
Your people are upskilled as part of every engagement. When we leave, the gains stay.
The stage we build for: the point where founder-built finance either scales or breaks.
Full working-day overlap with the UK and Europe, and a productive overlap with the US East Coast.
Senior delivery. No leverage pyramid, no juniors learning on your business.
Hourly billing rewards slow work. Stratum scopes to results.
A defined price, a defined window, a concrete deliverable. Low-risk way to see how we work.
The transformation itself, scoped against the diagnostic roadmap with agreed outcomes, not open-ended time.
We run the cadence we built: forecasting, scenarios, board reporting, and a finance partner on call.
No lock-in. Retainers run month to month. If the right answer for your stage is a full-time hire, we'll tell you, and hand over clean.
Send your last three months of financials. You get back a one-page view of your true runway, burn quality and the three numbers your next board meeting will turn on. No pitch attached.
Tell us a bit about where things stand. You'll hear back within a business day.