The largest line on your P&L that nobody can explain.
Cloud, SaaS, and infrastructure are now among the biggest costs in most founder-led companies and the least understood. In diligence, an unexplained technology line reads as risk. Most of it is margin you can recover, if you can show what the spend buys, who owns it, and what happens to it as the business grows.
Why a fractional CFO offers this
Most finance leaders can read the technology line. Few can rebuild it. Ten years inside IT financial management and enterprise FinOps, governing technology portfolios north of $200M, is the part of Practical's background that most fractional CFOs can't match. We know how engineering, procurement, and finance each see the same invoice, and how to get them to one number.
What the work is
A full accounting of what you spend on technology and what it buys. Cloud and SaaS cost optimization, allocation and chargeback so each product or team sees its own cost, business cases for the next technology investment, and vendor evaluation and negotiation support. The output is a technology cost position a buyer can read and a leadership team can manage.
What changes
Technology spend moves from an overhead line to a managed portfolio with an owner, a budget, and a forecast tied to usage. In diligence it stops being a question and becomes a strength.
The work, specifically.
Cloud and SaaS cost optimization
Rightsizing, commitment strategy, license reclamation, and the governance that keeps savings from drifting back.
Cost allocation and chargeback
Tagging and allocation models so product margin and team budgets reflect real technology cost.
Technology business cases
Build-versus-buy, migration, and platform decisions modeled on total cost and capital-versus-operating impact.
Vendor evaluation and negotiation support
Requirements, benchmarks, and the commercial structure before the renewal, not after.
Technology cost position for diligence
A defensible statement of what you spend, why, and how it scales.
FinOps operating model
Roles, cadence, and reporting sized to the company, drawn from the FinOps Foundation framework.
Start with a fifteen-minute call.
We’ll talk about where the company is headed and whether this is the right work to do first. If it isn’t, we’ll say so.