How a named partner, governed AI and a deployed bench fit together
Three claims sit behind this firm. This page shows the mechanics of each — because in a market full of “senior people and cutting-edge AI”, the only useful thing is the detail underneath.
- Edge one
- AI you can audit
- Edge two
- Named partners, deep bench
- Edge three
- We stay for the results
- Sign-off
- Always a human
- Overseen by
- PhD, Artificial Intelligence
AI you can audit
AI is not a marketing line here; it is infrastructure, designed and overseen by a founding partner who holds a PhD in artificial intelligence. It automates the mechanical layer of finance work — reconciliation, classification, first-draft reporting, forecasting, anomaly detection, natural-language querying of your own financials — so that senior time goes to judgment instead of keystrokes.
What makes it defensible is that every AI-assisted workflow is built with governance from the start, not retrofitted when an auditor asks. Documented assumptions. Version-controlled models. A continuous trail from a raw ledger entry to any number that reaches your board.
The market sells AI as speed. We sell it as speed you can defend. Competitors advertise an “AI CFO” or an “AI accountant”; the only firms selling governed AI are compliance-software companies. A finance firm saying partner-built AI, audit-grade trail, a doctorate accountable for it has, so far, no echo in this market.
What the machine does.
What a person does.
The line is drawn deliberately and never moves quietly. Anything involving judgment, materiality or fiduciary responsibility belongs to a human being with a name and a reputation.
Judgment calls
Materiality, revenue recognition edges, impairment, going-concern language, what to tell a board and how plainly. A model can draft the sentence; it cannot own it.
Client conversations
Bad news is delivered by the partner who will still be there next quarter, in person or on the phone, not in an automated report.
The mechanical layer
Matching, tie-outs, first drafts, variance calculation, data refreshes, anomaly scans. Work that is precise, repetitive and thankless — and where humans quietly make the most errors.
Named partners, deep bench
Every engagement is led directly by a partner of this firm. Not a principal who appears at the kick-off and the QBR; the person who does the work, answers the phone, and is in the room when the board asks the awkward question.
When a situation calls for expertise none of us should pretend to have — a state tax question, a technical accounting judgment, a sector where the benchmarks only make sense to someone who has lived in it — we reach into thirty years of relationships and bring in exactly the right person, for exactly as long as they are needed.
That is the whole design. Lean by intent, senior by default, specialists deployed rather than carried. You get the expertise your situation requires without funding a pyramid you will never meet.
Versus a solo fractional CFO
One excellent person is one person. When the work needs a tax specialist and a technical accountant in the same month, capacity becomes the constraint. Our bench removes that ceiling without adding overhead.
Versus a platform or a large firm
Scale is delivered by staffing pyramids and rotating account teams. The person who understood your business in March has moved on by September, and you explain it again.
Versus a consultant marketplace
Credentialed independents matched by an algorithm are paid for the engagement, not the outcome, and rotate off when the statement of work ends. Nobody is accountable for what happens after.
Who gets on the bench
People we have worked alongside — not resumes we screened. Every specialist arrives with a partner still accountable for the engagement, standard terms and a written scope.
We stay for the results
Plenty of firms can hand you a polished deck built on a sharp framework and a big-name pedigree. We have lived on the other side of that deck — as the CFO, the board member, the operator who stayed after the recommendation to make it actually work.
That experience is not decorative. It is why our recommendations tend to be narrower and more boring than a strategy firm’s: we have had to implement them, with an undersized team, while the month still had to close.
We are not paid for the report. We are accountable for the result. The quarterly review exists precisely so that claim can be tested out loud, on a schedule, with the option of ending the engagement on the table every time.
Engagements led by partners of this firm before its founding. Company names withheld on this site by choice; references available under NDA before you commit to anything.
What the relationship looks like
Deliberately unglamorous. A short call, a written scope, work that shows up, and a standing quarterly conversation about whether it is still worth it.
Discovery call
Thirty minutes with a partner. Where finance helps the business, where it is in the way, and what changed recently.
Scoped proposal
A sprint or a retainer, with deliverables, dates and price in writing. Specialists, if any, named and priced.
Partner-led delivery
The partner does the work with governed tooling behind them. You get artefacts — a pack, a model, a dashboard — not status reports.
Quarterly review
What worked, what did not, what changes. Scale up, scale down, add a specialist, or agree the work is done.
The questions people ask before the first call
Usually asked at the end, quietly. Here they are at the front instead.
Is AI safe anywhere near my books?
It is safe when it is scoped and governed, and genuinely risky when it is not. Ours does the mechanical layer only: reconciliation, classification, first drafts, variance calculation, anomaly detection. It does not decide materiality, it does not sign anything, and it does not talk to your board.
Underneath sits the same discipline an auditor would expect: documented assumptions, version-controlled models, time-stamped extracts, and a trail from source entry to reported figure. The partner who designed that governance holds a doctorate in artificial intelligence; the partners reviewing the output hold audit credentials. Both halves matter.
Are a handful of partners enough for a company like mine?
For the work that needs seniority, yes — that is exactly what you are buying. For work that needs a specialist, we bring one in: a tax specialist, a technical accountant, an industry veteran, drawn from three decades of relationships and deployed for as long as the situation requires.
If your need is genuinely full-time and permanent, we will say so on the first call and help you structure the hire rather than sell you a retainer that quietly underdelivers.
What does it cost, really?
Sprints run $5,000–$25,000 for a fixed scope. Retainers run $3,500–$7,500 a month at 10–20 hours, and $7,500–$15,000+ for embedded work. Specialists are $150–$400 an hour. Every engagement is priced in writing before it starts.
We publish this because most firms do not, and because the alternative anchor matters: a full-time senior finance hire costs $400,000+ a year, before you know whether you need one.
Are you a bookkeeping service?
No. We can put bookkeeping right, and we will tell you honestly when a good bookkeeping firm is the cheaper answer. What we are built for is the layer above: controls, reporting, planning, analysis and the judgment calls that come with them.
Neither cheap bookkeeping with a chatbot, nor a big-firm deck factory. That gap is the whole reason this firm exists.
We are a family business, not a startup. Does that matter?
Only in the language we use. The mechanics — a close you can trust, controls that hold, a forecast that survives contact with reality — are identical. Roughly half of the situations we are built for have no investors in them at all.
Who actually does the work?
A partner of this firm, named in the engagement letter, supported by governed tooling and by specialists we bring in deliberately. There is no junior pool and no rotation. If the named partner changes, that is a conversation with you, not a staffing note.
Where are you, and does it matter?
Boston, at 109 State Street, and we work remote-first across the US. Between the partners we have lived and worked in eight countries on three continents, so cross-border structures and international boards are familiar ground rather than a special project.
We’re not paid for the report. We’re accountable for the result.The standard we hold ourselves to
Test the claims on a call
Ask us how the audit trail works, who signs what, or what we would do first in your business. Thirty minutes, with a partner.