There is no rate card.Here is what sets the price.

You asked three firms and got three answers. One quoted a day rate. One quoted a monthly retainer with no indication of what was in it. One said it depends, and asked for another meeting. None of the three could be compared to either of the others, which is the part that makes the decision impossible rather than merely difficult.

The vagueness is not always evasion. Most of it is that the question has a real answer and it is not a number.

Why a day rate tells you almost nothing

A day rate prices attendance. It answers how much a person costs to have in the building, and says nothing about what leaves the building with them.

Two firms at the same day rate can deliver completely different things. One sends somebody senior who owns the outcome. The other sends somebody senior to the meeting and somebody junior to do the work, and the rate covers the meeting. The number is identical and you are buying two different products.

It also creates the wrong incentive. Anything priced by the day rewards the days. A finance function that runs properly needs fewer of them over time, not more.

What actually moves the price

Five things, in roughly the order they matter.

How much of the function already exists. A business with clean books, a month-end that closes, and a competent financial manager needs judgement laid on top. A business where none of that is true needs the function built first. Those are different pieces of work and it is the single largest driver of cost.

The shape of the business. One entity in one country with one currency is one job. Three entities across two countries with intercompany balances and two year-ends is a different one, and the difference is not proportional. Complexity compounds rather than adds.

What has to be fixed before anything can run. Most engagements begin with a period of repair: a chart of accounts nobody designed, controls that exist in one person's head, a year of transactions that need sorting before any of it can be trusted. That work is finite and it is real, and any price that ignores it is a price that will change later.

How often real decisions arrive. A business raising, buying something, entering a market, or renegotiating a facility needs its CFO far more often than a business trading steadily. This is the one that moves most over the life of a mandate.

Whether you are buying presence or judgement. If somebody has to be there, you are paying for days and the number will look like a salary. If you need the small number of decisions that move money to be made well, you are paying for something else entirely, and a small number of days a month can be enough.

The comparison most people make, and the one that matters

The instinct is to compare against a full-time salary. It is the wrong benchmark in both directions. It flatters the fractional model at the top end, and it hides the real question.

The number worth putting next to the price is what the decisions currently cost you. The hire that was a guess. The pricing that has not moved in two years because nobody modelled what would happen. The client absorbing a third of your costs for a fifth of your revenue. The facility renegotiated from a weak position because the numbers were not ready.

That is real money and it appears on no invoice, which is exactly why it goes unpriced.

What to ask instead of asking for a rate

Ask what the person is accountable for, as distinct from what they will advise on. Ask who does the work when they are not there. Ask what will exist on the last day that does not exist on the first. Ask what makes the price go up.

Any firm that can answer those four can quote you a number that means something. Any firm that cannot has given you your answer anyway.

Where our numbers are

Spurwing prices a CFO mandate after a scoping conversation, because the five drivers above genuinely differ between businesses and a rate card would be a guess dressed as a price.

Earlier-stage engagements are the exception. Pre-seed through Series B and beyond runs on four fixed monthly tiers, published, in US dollars, on the earlier-stage mandates page. The tier is set by monthly operating expenses, with funding stage as an indicative guide. The tier reflects the stage of the business. It does not reflect whether the finance function is owned. At every tier, it is.