Questions we get asked, answered plainly.

An outsourced accountant runs the finance work your business would otherwise hire staff for: bookkeeping, payroll, bill pay, tax preparation, compliance and reporting. At MSI it is one engagement covering the whole back office, kept current month to month, working alongside the CPA and attorney you already have rather than replacing them.

Hire one when the finance work starts costing you decisions. The usual signals: books that have drifted a month behind, only one person knowing how money moves, your CPA asking for records nobody can produce, and the owner doing bill pay at night. MSI works with operating companies doing $1M and up in revenue.

The difference is interpretation. A bookkeeper records what happened; an accountant interprets it, builds the controls around it, and tells you what it means for the decision in front of you. Growing companies usually need both, plus a senior eye across bookkeeping, payroll and controls. Tax preparation, audit compliance and financial reporting sit on the accountant's side.

MSI does not publish a price for CFO work. Every engagement starts with an assessment call, and the first 30 days carry no fee, so the scope is agreed before anything is billed. For nonprofit audit projects the proposal is a written scope covering what gets cleaned up, what gets prepared, and what it costs.

Yes, and a good one will insist on it. MSI does not draft legal documents or give legal opinions, and it does not replace your CPA. Your CPA keeps the returns, your attorney keeps the structure, and the outsourced team does the execution underneath so the advice they give actually gets implemented and documented.

You lose the person who knows how money moves through the business, which is a single point of failure, not an inconvenience. Confirm you can log into the bank accounts and payroll system, find the next payroll date and tax deadline, locate last year's return and the latest financials, then change any password that person controlled alone.