The client portal for independent financial advisory consultants.
Move financials without email attachments, keep a long retainer visible enough to review, and get the monthly invoice out even when the close runs long.
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Generic client tools don’t know what you actually deliver.
The most sensitive documents in the business travel by email
P&Ls, cap tables, forecasts, diligence packs, payroll summaries. This is the material a business guards most closely, and the default way it reaches you is an attachment on a thread with four people on it, one of whom left the company in March.
Your calendar belongs to the close
Month-end, quarter-end, year-end, and audit prep arrive on schedule whether or not you have capacity. Everything discretionary gets pushed into the gaps — which is why your own invoicing is chronically the last thing done and the first thing forgotten.
Fractional CFO work is a retainer with no natural finish line
A standing monthly engagement can run for years, quietly, with no phase gate to prompt a review. That is good business until you realise the scope has drifted a long way from what you originally agreed and the fee has not moved with it.
You look like a contractor when you are functioning as an executive
You sit in leadership meetings and own the numbers a board sees, but the operational impression — an invoice from a personal email, files in a shared folder — reads as a freelancer. That mismatch shows up when the fee comes under review.
How financial advisory consultants use ConsultBase.
How does a fractional CFO use ConsultBase?
You create an engagement per client and give it milestones matching the work you actually agreed — reporting pack rebuilt, forecast model delivered, board reporting live, systems migration supported. Financial documents move through the engagement rather than email, so there is one current version instead of several forwarded copies. The client sees a portal branded to your practice showing what is in progress, what is with them, and what has been delivered.
How does this keep financial documents out of email threads?
Documents are shared into the engagement, where the client retrieves them from the portal rather than from an attachment. That means one canonical version, a dated history, and no copies sitting permanently in the inboxes of people who have since changed roles. When someone outside the portal genuinely needs a file — an auditor, a lender, external counsel — you send an expiring download link rather than an attachment.
What does the client see during month-end when I am heads-down?
The portal answers "where are we" without you writing an update. Current phase, delivered items, anything sitting with them for review, and what you are waiting on from their side. During a close, that last one is usually the honest bottleneck, and showing it plainly is easier than raising it in a meeting.
How do I bill a monthly advisory retainer without thinking about it?
Set up a recurring invoice once — amount, frequency, payment terms, your own tax rate — and it generates and sends on schedule with a payment link attached, including in the months when the close consumes the first two weeks. Payments run through your own Stripe account at Stripe’s standard rates; ConsultBase takes nothing on top and never becomes the merchant of record.
How do I handle scope drift on a long retainer?
The engagement holds what was actually agreed, so drift becomes visible rather than gradual. When the work has genuinely grown, you send a revised proposal the client signs online, which creates its own engagement and milestones on acceptance. That gives a long-running arrangement a natural review point instead of an awkward conversation you keep postponing.
Can I run project work alongside the retainer?
Yes — a diligence support engagement or a systems implementation runs as its own engagement for the same client. Log time against it and convert those entries straight into an invoice with line items pre-filled, so hourly work is not reconstructed from memory at month end.
Questions financial advisory consultants ask.
Is this suitable for a registered investment adviser or broker-dealer?
No, and this needs to be unambiguous. ConsultBase does not provide WORM-compliant storage, supervised archiving, or the retention and review capabilities required under SEC and FINRA books-and-records rules. If you are an RIA or broker-dealer with recordkeeping obligations for client communications, this is not a compliant system and should not be used as one. This page is written for corporate financial advisory — fractional CFO, FP&A, controllership, transaction support — where those obligations do not apply.
Does it connect to QuickBooks, Xero, or NetSuite?
No. There are no accounting integrations and no public API to build one against. ConsultBase manages your advisory relationship — engagement, deliverables, documents, proposals, invoicing for your own fees — not your client’s books. Their ledger stays in their accounting system, which is where their accountant and auditor expect to find it.
Is the invoicing here for my fees or my client’s customers?
Your fees. ConsultBase invoices your clients for your advisory work and collects through your own Stripe account. It is not an AR system for running your client’s receivables, and using it that way would mix their revenue into your payment account.
How is client data isolated between engagements?
At the database level rather than by application logic — row-level security on every table, so one client’s records are not reachable from another client’s session even if a query is written incorrectly. Client portal access is passwordless and scoped to a single client, so a CFO at one company cannot reach another company’s documents.
Can I bring in an associate for a larger engagement?
Pro includes up to three team members and Firm up to five, with owner, admin and member roles governing who can invite, remove, change branding and manage bookings. It is a workspace-level role system rather than per-engagement access control — relevant when the material is this sensitive.
What does it cost, and is my client count capped?
Every paid plan includes unlimited clients, so a portfolio of fractional retainers is not a pricing problem. Plans differ on team size, AI access and white-labelling. Firm removes the “Powered by ConsultBase” mark from every client-facing surface. There is a 14-day free trial and no credit card is required.
Fractional finance work has an odd asymmetry. You operate at executive level — sitting in leadership meetings, owning the numbers a board reads — while running the back office of a one-person business out of email and a shared folder.
Clients notice, usually without articulating it. The gap between how you perform in the room and how the engagement is administered is exactly the gap that surfaces when someone asks whether the retainer is still the right number.
ConsultBase was built for advisory practices — engagements rather than projects, deliverables the client formally approves, retainers rather than subscriptions. For fractional CFO work the value is mostly in what stops happening: documents no longer scattered across threads, the retainer invoice no longer late because the close ran long, and the scope conversation no longer postponed because there is nowhere neutral to have it.
Built for the way you work.
Unlimited clients on every plan, a branded portal your clients actually log into, and Ivy — a 50+ tool AI associate that knows your engagements.
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