Attivo are consultants who report on your business. Bridges is a team of operators building it with you.

Choose Attivo when institutional credibility matters more than depth. Choose Bridges when the strategic questions get hard.

Both firms handle monthly financials, FP&A, and fundraising support. Both have long client lists and real VC referral networks. The difference is what happens when the numbers don't reconcile, when the board asks a question nobody prepared for, when the pricing model needs to be restructured before the raise. At that point, what matters isn't the firm's name. It's whether the person in the room has done this before from the inside.

Bridges vs. Attivo: Side-by-Side Comparison

How Attivo Works

Attivo is a credentialed outsourced accounting firm. Their teams are trained finance professionals — accountants, controllers, and CFO advisors who serve companies across AI, enterprise, consumer, and fintech from the earliest stages.

Attivo has built genuine expertise across startup verticals. For a founder who needs a credentialed firm that can grow with them from seed through Series C, Attivo is a reasonable choice. Attivo's team comes primarily from accounting firms and controller roles at traditional businesses.

How Bridges Works

Bridges is a boutique strategic finance firm where every engagement is led by Tim Salikhov, a payments CFO who has held VP Finance roles inside the kinds of companies Bridges serves. Concurrent engagements are kept to 8–12 total — not per person, for the firm — so the team has the capacity to actually know your business.

Every member of the Bridges team spent 10–20 years operating inside vertical SaaS, B2B payments, and FinTech companies — as VP Finance, Controllers, and FP&A leads — before doing this work. Generic SaaS benchmarks don't capture businesses with payment layers, usage-based billing, or embedded fintech.

Payments SaaS Needs Operators, Not Accountants

The distinction that matters for payments-enabled SaaS isn't whether your CFO firm has a fintech practice. It's whether the people doing the work have ever sat inside a company like yours and made the decisions you're now making. Attivo's team comes primarily from accounting firms and controller roles at traditional businesses. Bridges' team spent 10–20 years operating inside vertical SaaS, B2B payments, and FinTech companies before doing this work.

Track Record That Matters When Hiring a Fractional CFO Firm

Attivo has a large portfolio — 600+ clients served, with more than $12 billion raised across those companies. That's a real credential. Bridges keeps engagements small enough that each one moves the needle, and publishes the numbers because they're worth publishing. At Bridges, every number in this table went through Tim's hands directly. At Attivo, the portfolio figure reflects hundreds of engagements served by rotating teams at different stages of depth.

Team Continuity Is the Difference Between a Partner and a Vendor

Attivo believes in long-term relationships. The pitch is a dedicated team embedded in your business, growing with you from seed through Series C. In practice, the team changes. Attivo's consultants are staffed across multiple accounts. When workloads shift, accounts get reassigned. When someone leaves the firm, your account moves to someone new. Every transition requires rebuilding context — how your payments flow, why certain accounts are mapped the way they are, what the revenue recognition policy reflects about your product.

Based on personal hands-on experience with Attivo, the team changed twice over an eight-month period. Each time, re-onboarding a new team on the business, the payment architecture, and the history behind key decisions meant lost time and lost momentum — not what you want heading into a board meeting or a raise.

At Bridges, Tim Salikhov is the CFO on every engagement from onboarding through transition.

People, Process, and Automation Determine How Your CFO Firm Spends Its Time

Attivo's work is largely manual — spreadsheet-based financial models, Excel-driven reporting, and traditional accounting processes. This is standard for outsourced CFO firms built before automation was viable, and Attivo does it competently. The consequence is that more hours go toward reconciling data and producing reports than toward the analysis those reports are meant to inform.

Bridges operates with official partnerships with Stripe, Rillet, and Tabs, and custom automation built on Claude. Where manual reconciliation would take hours, Bridges automates it — which means fewer hours on low-value work and more capacity for the questions that matter before a raise or a board meeting.

Hourly Billing and Fixed Fees Produce Very Different Outcomes

Attivo bills by the hour. Rates range from approximately $100 to $400 per hour depending on the role — staff accountants at the lower end, CFO-level resources at the higher end. There is also a 3% administrative and technology fee on each invoice. When a firm bills for time, there's no structural reason to automate, to move faster, or to solve a problem once. Additional requests — troubleshooting a reconciliation issue, building a new scenario in the model, preparing for a board question — each carry a new cost. Based on personal hands-on experience with Attivo, real monthly costs typically run 25–50% above original estimates.

Bridges charges a fixed monthly retainer covering strategic finance, FP&A, and bookkeeping under one roof — rescoped every quarter. No hourly billing, no administrative fees, no surprises when a hard problem needs to be solved.