From stabilising a finance function under pressure to building machine learning models that predict churn and automate board reporting — senior expertise applied precisely where your business needs it.
Board-level finance leadership on a fixed-term basis, available from as little as one week’s notice. Suited to businesses covering a parental leave, navigating an unexpected departure, managing a PE transaction, or bridging to a permanent hire during a period of rapid change.
Graeme has operated as interim CFO across a range of PE-backed and founder-led SMEs with direct experience of investor reporting, liquidity management, acquisition integration, and finance team stabilisation. He joins as a full member of the board or senior management team, accountable for all financial outcomes during the engagement.
Part-time CFO leadership — typically one to three days per week — for businesses that require strategic financial rigour without the commitment of a full-time executive hire. Suited to scaling businesses between £2m and £20m revenue (or ARR) where complexity is increasing.
A fractional arrangement provides continuous executive leadership and an embedded partner in your leadership team, rather than surface-level advisory. Graeme combines board-level commercial strategy with modern, AI-enhanced financial tools — handling everything from 3-statement forecasting and investor management to automated reporting workflows.
For growth-stage businesses whose finance function was built for a much smaller operation and has not scaled with the business — or for early-stage companies that need to implement a proper finance infrastructure for the first time.
This typically involves selecting and implementing an ERP (or upgrading the existing system), designing the chart of accounts and reporting hierarchy, building the management reporting pack, establishing internal controls, and putting in place the team and processes to support continued growth. The goal is a finance function that is credible to investors, reliable to management, and capable of operating without constant firefighting.
Machine learning models and LLM-powered analytical systems that replace static Excel reports with predictive dashboards and intelligent automation. As a graduate of the MIT Professional Education Applied AI & Data Science Program (8 courses, 61 working models), Graeme applies these techniques directly to client mandates — combining CFO-level commercial judgment with rigorous statistical methodology.
For SaaS and recurring revenue businesses, this means XGBoost or Random Forest churn risk models that score customer accounts weekly, paired with K-Means clustering to drive pricing and upsell strategy. For any business, it means board pack commentary automatically generated from live actuals data — providing automated variance narratives each morning, rather than manual assembly the night before a board meeting.
Eliminating the manual, repetitive tasks that consume finance teams and introduce human error — by building lightweight, robust integrations and automated pipelines between the systems your business already uses.
Common examples include automated multi-entity consolidation into a group ERP, deferred revenue recognition engines fed by billing outputs, and automated CRM-to-ledger pipelines that eliminate manual data entry.
Graeme also builds LLM-powered workflows using enterprise LLM APIs — generating management commentary, variance narratives, and executive summaries directly from live actuals data, rather than being written manually at month-end. All tools are custom-built in Python and JavaScript, designed to be lightweight and fully maintainable by the finance team without relying on internal IT support.
Where individual tools solve point problems, this is whole-function transformation — a structured programme that embeds Machine Learning, Deep Learning, and AI directly into your finance function’s monthly cycle.
AI initiatives in finance usually fail for one reason: they are either handed to technical teams who have never managed a P&L or month-end close, or to finance teams who don't understand model capabilities. Graeme bridges this gap by wearing two hats simultaneously — combining 20 years of CFO leadership with MIT-trained Applied AI, Machine Learning, and Deep Learning capability.
The engagement scales to your existing team:
Architect & Build (Hands-On): For companies without a data science team, Graeme scopes the architecture, builds the machine learning and deep learning models himself, and delivers documented, operational systems embedded into your workflow.
Govern & Oversee (Technical Steering): For businesses with an existing data team or third-party vendor, Graeme provides finance-literate technical governance — prioritising high-ROI builds, auditing model architecture, and translating complex data science into board-level strategy.
Rigorous technical accounting work — the kind that is needed in connection with acquisitions, audits, PE transactions, and complex group structures — executed by a CA(SA) with hands-on experience of the most demanding scenarios, and communicated clearly to non-technical stakeholders.
Recent technical accounting work includes Purchase Price Allocation modelling for multiple acquisitions at Dext and Informa, a group-wide going concern assessment, impairment reviews (including DCF modelling for goodwill impairment), deferred and contingent consideration fair value calculations, worldwide transfer pricing implementation, and a material prior-year restatement identified and resolved during a group statutory audit.
The year-end audit and the statutory accounts are where a finance function is judged — and where an unprepared one loses weeks and credibility. Croftlands Consulting gets the company audit-ready, runs the year-end process end to end, and prepares statutory financial statements under FRS 102 or IFRS.
The same discipline starts at month-end: a clean, timely close is what makes year-end painless, so the two are delivered together. Graeme has managed group statutory audits, resolved a material prior-year revenue restatement mid-audit, and achieved zero audit adjustments on two acquisitions in a subsequent FTSE 100 group audit — with auditors from the Big 4 through to mid-tier firms.
Financial advisory support across the deal lifecycle — from early-stage valuation work and target assessment through to financial due diligence, deal structuring input, and post-deal integration. Available on both the buy-side (supporting acquirers) and sell-side (preparing businesses for sale).
Graeme has led financial due diligence processes on multiple acquisitions, prepared and reviewed company valuations using DCF and market comparable methodologies, and has been instrumental in post-deal integration at both FTSE 100 and PE-backed SME level.
Sophisticated financial modelling that goes beyond the standard Excel budget — using regression, scenario planning, and sensitivity analysis to build forecasts that genuinely reflect the drivers of your business rather than last year’s actuals multiplied by a percentage.
The 12-week rolling cashflow model is built from first principles — a receipts-and-payments model maintained with weekly discipline and daily cash management rigour. For SaaS, ARR and churn forecasting is built on cohort data and regression analysis, enabling boards to model the impact of pricing changes, product launches, and sales team changes with precision. Scenario analysis (base, stress, upside) is built in from day one.
Structured finance integration from Day 1 post-signing through to the first clean month-end in the parent’s systems — with the governance, pace, and attention to data quality that PE investors and listed company CFOs require.
Graeme led the finance integration of two acquisitions at Informa (EV $340m and £22m), covering chart of accounts mapping, opening balance sheet review, deferred revenue and earnout accounting, six months of ETB management and upload to SAP FC, governance structure (RAID log, integration step plan, Steerco), and policy alignment. He has also led acquisition integrations into NetSuite at Dext Software across multiple jurisdictions.
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