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A fractional CFO is an experienced finance executive embedded part-time as a named member of your leadership team. At Novum Partners, a fractional CFO owns financial strategy, cash flow forecasting, board reporting, budgeting and FP&A, fundraising and lending support, mergers and acquisitions guidance, KPI design, and the leadership-team financial cadence. Unlike a controller who looks backward, the CFO looks forward. Novum's fractional CFO sits in your leadership meetings, translates the numbers for non-finance executives, builds the dashboards your board actually reads, and stays long enough for the strategy to compound. Novum delivers the fractional CFO seat as a CFO Advisory add-on to Finance and Accounting Core+ or Strategic, with monthly investment starting at $4,000 and scaling with engagement depth. Most clients engage this seat when revenue passes $5M but a full-time hire would burn budget the mission needs elsewhere.

Fund accounting is how nonprofits and churches operationalize the GAAP requirement to classify net assets by donor restriction, set by ASU 2016-14 in the FASB standard for not-for-profit financial reporting. Under that standard, every nonprofit reports net assets in two classes: without donor restrictions and with donor restrictions. Fund accounting is the practice that makes the classification real day-to-day, tracking dollars by donor restriction, program, and purpose rather than treating revenue as one undifferentiated pool. A nonprofit or church does not have one bucket of money: it has unrestricted operating dollars, temporarily restricted grants, permanently restricted endowment, building fund contributions, missions designations, and more. Without proper fund accounting, a nonprofit can technically misspend a restricted gift, fail an audit, or lose donor trust. Novum Partners builds the structure in QuickBooks Online Advanced and Sage Intacct, and trains internal teams to maintain it after Novum hands the keys back.

Church bookkeeping requires fund accounting (restricted versus unrestricted giving), housing allowance designation and tracking for ordained ministers, dual-status minister payroll (SECA self-employment tax, no employer FICA match), benevolence fund administration, mission trip and short-term mission accounting, and donor-acknowledgment letters that meet IRS substantiation rules. Standard for-profit bookkeeping handles none of these. A general bookkeeper who applies business logic to a church will misclassify the housing allowance, miss SECA exposure, blend restricted and unrestricted dollars, and create audit risk that surfaces years later. Novum Partners staffs church engagements with bookkeepers and controllers who have done this work specifically for churches, not as a side capability.

Hire a controller when the work is clean monthly close, AP and AR management, payroll oversight, audit prep, and reliable execution against an existing plan, typically once revenue passes roughly $3M to $5M. Hire a fractional CFO when the work is forward-looking: building a multi-year financial model, navigating a capital campaign, reading a balance sheet to a board, evaluating an acquisition, restructuring debt, designing a reserves policy, or replacing a finance leader who just left. Many Novum clients use both in sequence. Novum's fractional CFO sets the strategy and recruits the controller, then steps back to a quarterly cadence as the internal seat is filled.

Novum Partners treats audit readiness as a year-round discipline, not a Q1 fire drill. At the Finance and Accounting Strategic tier, Novum delivers full audit prep and auditor liaison; Core+ provides light support; Core does not include audit preparation. The work Novum maintains across the year for Strategic clients includes board-approved policies, restricted-fund reconciliations, fixed-asset schedules, payroll tax filings, contribution acknowledgment letters, and related-party disclosures, all held inside a live audit binder that updates every month. For organizations required to file Form 990 (including separately incorporated school, foundation, or affiliate 501(c)(3) entities), Novum coordinates the filing package with the external tax preparer. Churches and other entities statutorily exempt from Form 990 receive support for voluntary transparency documents or equivalent stewardship reporting at leadership's election.

Novum Partners delivers monthly close on a tiered service-level standard: business day 15 for Finance and Accounting Core, business day 10 for Core+ and Strategic. The path runs through Novum's three-phase model. Discovery (Signature through Month 1, four to six weeks) covers onboarding, current-state assessment, and the signed Transformation Plan. Transformation (Months 1 through 3) covers chart-of-accounts rearchitecture, restricted-fund structure, report build, and clean-up, with three monthly closes delivered to standard. Stewardship begins Month 4 as steady state, with the tiered close commitment held every month thereafter. Cleanup engagements where prior records are materially out of order can extend Transformation by an additional 30 to 60 days, scoped transparently in the engagement letter.

Novum Partners runs a deliberately tight technology stack so every client benefits from the same standards, depth of expertise, and integration discipline. For general ledger and accounting: QuickBooks Online Advanced and Sage Intacct exclusively. For FP&A and budgeting: Martus and SYFT. For payroll: Gusto and Rippling. For expense management: Ramp, BILL, Divvy, and Expensify. For donor management and Church Management Systems: Planning Center, Pushpay, Subsplash Giving, Bloomerang, DonorPerfect, Rock RMS, Salesforce, and Virtuous. Novum evaluates the existing stack during Discovery and migrates clients onto supported platforms during Transformation when the current tool is materially blocking growth, compliance, or visibility.