What does a CFO do

A CFO owns financial strategy, the capital plan, governance and the investor relationship, reporting to the CEO. In an Australian startup the boundaries are looser than any job description suggests, with the same person moving from ordering stationery to board meetings.

The job past the reporting line

The CFO role transcends financial reporting. It takes in strategic advice, challenging decisions and genuine business input, and if the CEO does not instinctively trust or enjoy working with the CFO, technical ability becomes largely irrelevant, a case Rob Shore, CFO of Retail Food Group put to me directly on the CFO Track podcast I host. That last part surprises founders, but it is the part that decides whether the hire works. The governance half of the mandate has a statutory floor: Australian directors carry duties under the Corporations Act to keep proper records and avoid insolvent trading, and a CFO is usually the person making that practicable.

There are really two camps in finance now. The old school is the scorekeeper and back-office approach. The new breed is tech-enabled, takes a driver's seat role next to the CEO or founder, makes good commercial decisions, and creates processes for scale rather than acting as a handbrake. When founders ask what a CFO does, the useful answer is the second camp's job description, because that is the one worth paying for.

In a startup the boundaries are looser than any job description suggests. The reality of startup finance roles is that the work is not neatly defined: people go from ordering stationery to financial modelling and board meetings, shifting between strategic and operational work constantly. Hiring someone who expects a clean mandate is a mismatch you will feel in month three.

The remit itself is testable. I use eight areas: capital strategy, investor relations, board management, M&A, finance org build, strategic partnering, risk and governance, and the narrative and equity story. If a candidate cannot credibly speak to six of the eight, they are a Head of Finance, not a CFO, whatever the title says.^[1]

The behavioural difference between a reporting hire and a strategic one is the same thing that separates the salary bands.

What the first finance person really builds

Before the CFO conversation, most businesses need a first finance hire, and the framing matters. The first finance person is not a bookkeeper. They are the person who builds the foundational infrastructure your business grows on: reporting frameworks, compliance structures, and the systems that support fundraising, acquisition and scaling. Our first finance hire guide sets out which version of that role fits each funding stage.

That infrastructure is what a later CFO inherits. Get it right and the CFO arrives to a function they can lead. Get it wrong and their first year is a rebuild, which is expensive at CFO rates. The starting condition is worse than most founders admit: in our Q3 2026 State of the Market poll, 70% of first finance hires said the first thing they walk into is messy accounts and reporting, and another 21% inherit no forecast or model at all. That is 91% of first hires walking into a function that is either behind or blind, which is why the first quarter should be resourced for cleanup rather than judged on visible output.^[2]

I set out how the finance function splits as headcount grows, and which role to add in what order.

Why the requirements change as you scale

The same person is not right forever. A finance professional who is excellent pre-revenue and at building foundations will usually lead the function well through to Series A, but the requirements become very different after that. Recognising that is not a criticism of the person; it is the normal shape of the role.

What the role grows into is breadth. As a business expands across multiple jurisdictions or entities, the CFO becomes less of a specialist and more of a conductor across business units, giving advice on many elements and impacting outcomes rather than doing the specialist work themselves. The remit widens with it. I am regularly recruiting CFO roles that oversee legal, risk and governance, and the people function alongside finance; one recent mandate covered a finance team, a legal team and a fractional people partner working four days a week.

Sector context changes the brief too. For a deep tech CFO the transferable skills are managing capital-intensive environments, long lead times, demanding technical stakeholders, and building reporting under uncertainty. Those transfer from manufacturing, defence or mining more readily than a matching industry label would suggest.

The part AI has not taken

CFO and first-finance-hire roles are comparatively AI-resistant, because they require investor communication, building financial infrastructure across the business, and operating with judgement under ambiguity, unlike more junior finance work. The tooling has genuinely absorbed a lot of production work. It has not absorbed the decisions.

Where AI has moved the line is lower down. What was a virtual CFO workload three years ago is increasingly something a financially capable founder can do with AI in the loop. But AI tools remain poor at challenging the assumptions behind them, and the real value of a senior finance person is the pushback, not the spreadsheet.

My working rule: AI can handle 80 to 90% of the basic finance tasks, the checking, the reconciliation, a first-pass analysis, forecast or model. The last 10% needs a qualified human who understands the actual challenge and knows what a good outcome looks like. And that human has to genuinely understand the space, because a reviewer who cannot sense-check the output is not a human in the loop, they are just trusting it.

I went deeper on the strategic planning half of the CFO role, including what AI now does and does not do.

For how the CFO role sits against the CEO, see CFO vs CEO.

Common questions