Ask a chief executive how long they spend on finance admin and the honest answer is usually a shrug. Call it four hours a week. Over a year that is around five working weeks.

The five weeks are not the expensive part. The expensive part is which five weeks. Bookkeeping gets done when everything else is finished, which means evenings, weekends, and the week before a claim deadline. That is the same capacity the organisation needs for the funding application, the partnership conversation and the conversation with a trustee who is thinking of leaving.

There is a second cost that never appears anywhere. A CEO doing their own books cannot review their own books. Nobody checks the coding. Nobody asks why a restricted award has been posted to general income. We reconciled funding awards against income received for one grant-funded not-for-profit, line by line, during onboarding. It turned up over £200,000 of funding where the claim paperwork had never been completed. The money had been awarded. It simply had not been asked for.

That was not carelessness. It was one person holding too many jobs and no second pair of eyes on any of them.

Boards adapt to the information they are given. If the finance report arrives the night before, or arrives as a bank balance and a sentence, trustees stop asking about anything else. Not because they are relaxed, but because they have learned there is no answer available in the room.

You can usually hear it in the questions. A board with decent reporting asks how much of the restricted funding is still unspent and whether the underspend will need to be returned. A board without it asks whether the bank account is alright.

The second question is the dangerous one. It can be answered yes by an organisation that is three months from a cash problem, because a healthy bank balance can be entirely someone else’s restricted money sitting there waiting to be spent.

When the CEO is doing the bookkeeping, this is the part that slips first. Coding transactions is urgent and visible. Turning those transactions into a fund-by-fund position for trustees is neither, so it waits. Then the funder asks for evidence, and the reconstruction begins.

If that pattern sounds familiar, our piece on when the board wants better reporting goes further into what a usable board pack contains.

The obvious answer is to hire someone. For most organisations under a few million in income, we think that is the wrong first move.

A finance manager is a single point of failure with a salary attached. You need the bookkeeping done, the payroll run, the VAT position understood where it applies, the restricted funds tracked, the claims prepared, the year-end filed, and someone who can sit with the board and explain what the numbers mean. That is not one skill set and it is rarely one person’s week.

What usually happens is that the organisation hires at the level it can afford, which is bookkeeping level, and then the CEO keeps doing the reporting and the funder conversations anyway. The salary goes out and the Sunday evening stays.

There is also the recruitment risk. The role is often part time, the organisation cannot offer progression, and when the person leaves in eighteen months the knowledge leaves with them. We have picked up more than one set of records where the only explanation of how funds were tracked lived in a former employee’s head.

An outsourced finance function gives you the whole set of tasks covered by a routine rather than a person, and the routine does not resign.

We work to a defined ninety-day onboarding, and it runs in three parts.

Month one is foundations. We complete the due diligence and AML checks, collect the records, and get the bookkeeping complete and accurate. Banks reconciled. Supplier and customer balances that make sense. Any historic gaps identified and written down rather than quietly inherited. We also agree who does what, which is usually the first time anyone has written that down.

Month two is process. Regular routines for bookkeeping, supplier bills, credit control, payroll and reporting, with checks built in and duplicated manual work removed where it is practical.

Month three is the finance function running to an agreed timetable: accurate records, clear visibility over cash, restricted funds, debtors and creditors, and management information that reaches the board before the meeting rather than after it.

The ninety days matter because the CEO does not get their evenings back on day one. Someone has to reconstruct what happened, and reconstruction takes longer than doing it properly in the first place. By day ninety the work has moved and the timetable holds. If you already have an accountant or bookkeeper, we run the handover ourselves at no separate charge.

Not every organisation needs to move the work. A small operation with one funder and twenty transactions a month is fine with a careful CEO and a decent spreadsheet.

Here is where we think the line sits. You have crossed it when any of the following is true:

• A funder has asked for evidence and it took more than a couple of days to produce.
• You cannot say, today, how much of each restricted award remains unspent.
• A claim has gone in late, or gone in for less than you were entitled to.
• The board asks a finance question and the honest answer is that you will check and come back.
• You are doing the coding after the children are in bed.

One of those is a bad month. Three of them is a structural problem, and it will not fix itself when the next grant lands, because the next grant brings another reporting timetable with it.

The decision the CEO is really making is whether to keep spending their scarcest capacity on the lowest-value work in the organisation. Put like that, it is not a close call.