Financial strategy
Everything else we do is bought against a deadline. This is not. Compliance is judged on a filing that has to be right every quarter for years, and a CFO retainer is judged at a board meeting months after it starts.
So the arrangement is what is being bought, and this page states it: who is accountable for which part, and what you are left holding when it ends.
Taxation and regulatory compliance
The recurring filing calendar, the positions taken inside it, the registrations a company picks up as it grows, and the notices that follow them.
A compliance failure is rarely found by the department first. It is found in diligence, by a buyer’s counsel or a lender’s credit team — the most expensive place for it to surface, because there it is not a penalty but a price adjustment, or a condition precedent that cannot be cleared before the committee date.
Two changes since 2024 are read as settling more than they did. Angel tax is gone; section 68 is not — an assessing officer can still ask you to explain the source of a credit in the books, which on a share allotment means producing, years later, who the investor was and that the money was theirs. And DPIIT recognition is not the tax holiday: section 80-IAC needs its own certificate from the Inter-Ministerial Board, and that certificate cannot be applied backwards, so every cycle that closes without it is a year of holiday that does not come back.
Income-tax Act section 68; section 80-IAC, re-enacted at section 140 of the Income-tax Act, 2025, certified by the Inter-Ministerial Board.
Fractional CFO
A finance function for a company that needs one and cannot yet justify hiring it: the close, the reporting, the cash forecast, and the lender and investor relationship, run at the seniority those things require rather than the seniority the payroll currently supports.
This is worth stating plainly because it is bought differently from everything else on this site. A transaction mandate is bought against a known outcome — a closed deal. A retainer is bought on an arrangement, and an arrangement left vague at the start becomes visible at the first board meeting where something is late and nobody had agreed whose it was.
So the split is written down before it starts. We own outputs: a monthly close that lands on a stated date, a reporting pack the board and the lender both read from, a rolling cash forecast, the covenant and compliance calendar, and the responses when a lender or an investor asks a question. We advise on decisions and do not take them: pricing, hiring, what to do with an undrawn facility, whether to raise now or later. Those stay with the board — an advisor who quietly starts taking them has removed the accountability the arrangement existed to create.
It starts with a short first phase before any ongoing rhythm is agreed: establishing what the numbers actually are, which of them can be relied on and which cannot, and what the reporting has to produce for whoever reads it. Pricing a retainer before anyone knows the state of the books gets it wrong in one direction or the other. It then runs in months rather than weeks, because a finance function does not turn around inside a quarter. And it is built to end: the natural exit is a full-time hire, which we help select and hand over to — the calendar, the models, the working papers, the lender contacts. A retainer with no exit condition is a fee rather than a service.
Questions we answer in the first conversation
Tell us what the finance function has to produce
For compliance work, the useful first message is the entity list and what is already in place. For a retainer, it is the question the board asked that the reporting could not answer.
Answer the five questions