Pilot keeps your books clean. Bridges builds the finance infrastructure to close your next round.

Choose Pilot for clean books at seed. Choose Bridges when the strategic questions get hard.

Pilot is the right choice if you're pre-seed or seed and your primary finance problem is accurate bookkeeping at a fair price. Bridges is right once you've crossed $3M ARR and the questions get harder — which bets to make with your runway, whether the revenue model works at scale, and how to build the finance infrastructure your next round depends on.

Bridges vs. Pilot: Side-by-Side

(1) Pilot's published prices start at $999/month for bookkeeping for companies with $150,000+ in monthly expenses, and $5,250 per month for custom fractional CFO support. These are published prices as of October 22, 2026.

(2) Strategic Finance starts at $10,000 per month. Fractional CFO, which includes Strategic Finance plus board and investor reporting, starts at $15,000 per month.

How Pilot Works

Pilot uses software to categorize transactions, paired with a bookkeeper team for human review. Founders get clean monthly financials at a predictable price without a full-time accounting hire.

Pilot's CFO services include budgeting, forecasting, and investor reporting. Their fractional CFOs follow a standardized framework, and the majority have never worked inside a company. The service is better at describing what happened last month than shaping what should happen next.

How Bridges Works

Bridges is a boutique strategic finance firm. Tim Salikhov serves as CFO on every engagement, supported by controllers and financial analysts. Concurrent engagements are kept to 10 to 15 at any time — to optimize for outcome, not volume.

Every member of the Bridges team spent 10–20 years operating inside vertical SaaS, B2B payments, and FinTech companies — as VP Finance, Controllers, and Strategic Finance leads. Bridges takes on clients post-seed, supports them through Series B, and ensures a clean transition to an in-house VP Finance when the time comes.

The first 4–6 weeks are the most intensive. Bridges rebuilds the financial infrastructure from the ground up — billing operations, payment processing, data labeling, account mapping, and connecting all financial systems to a single source of truth. Concurrently, Bridges builds the strategic finance infrastructure: financial model, unit economics analysis, and go-to-market review informed by CRM data and operator experience.

Choose a Fractional CFO With Experience in Your Industry

Pilot serves startups across any sector. Bridges only works in verticals where the team has spent careers. Generic SaaS benchmarks don't capture businesses with payment layers, usage-based billing, or enterprise contracts. A CFO applying standard frameworks to a payments-enabled platform is giving advice built for a company you're not running.

Track Record That Matters When Hiring a Fractional CFO Firm

Pilot serves over 1,000 clients across startups, small businesses, and professional services firms but publishes no outcome data. Bridges keeps engagements small enough that each one moves the needle — and publishes the numbers because they're worth publishing.

Team Stability Is the Foundation of a Successful Fractional CFO Engagement

At Pilot, you're assigned a bookkeeper team and a CFO team. Pilot employs 300+ people and turnover is high. Based on first-hand experience as a Pilot client, it's common to cycle through four different teams in 15 months. Every transition means lost context and a finance partner who doesn't know your business.

At Bridges, Tim Salikhov is the CFO on every engagement. Controllers and financial analysts support the work, but Tim is the point of contact throughout — from onboarding through transition.

What to Expect After You Hire a Fractional CFO

Bridges reaches steady state in 4–6 weeks and delivers finalized books by the 10th business day. The first weeks are spent rebuilding billing operations, mapping accounts, and connecting all financial systems to a single source of truth — so the reporting that follows is accurate from the ground up.

Based on first-hand experience as a Pilot client, Pilot typically closes books between the 15th and 20th business day and takes 2–4 months to reach steady state.

*Based on first-hand experience as a Pilot client.

Great Fractional CFOs Set a Clear Communication Standard

Pilot runs a proprietary categorization platform with human review layered on. Bridges operates as a boutique — 10 to 15 engagements at a time — with official partnerships with Stripe, Rillet, and Tabs, and custom automation built on Claude.

The Best Fractional CFOs Price for Outcomes, Not Hours

Pilot's published starting prices are $999/month for bookkeeping for companies with $150,000+ in monthly expenses and $5,250/month for custom fractional CFO support, as of October 22, 2026. For an average engagement, Pilot charges $6,000–$12,000/month for monthly fractional CFO and bookkeeping services, on a quarterly commitment. CFO services are priced separately on top of that. Pilot also typically charges an onboarding fee of $10,000–$20,000.

Bridges charges $1,750–$2,750+/month for accounting and $10,000–$15,000+/month⁽²⁾ for fractional CFO on a flat monthly fee, with strategic finance and accounting under one roof. No onboarding fee. Three-month initial commitment, then month-to-month.

(1) Pilot's published prices start at $999/month for bookkeeping for companies with $150,000+ in monthly expenses, and $5,250 per month for custom fractional CFO support. These are published prices as of October 22, 2026.

(2) Strategic Finance starts at $10,000 per month. Fractional CFO, which includes Strategic Finance plus board and investor reporting, starts at $15,000 per month.