About
A finance function, for hire.
The firm
Built for organizations the market forgot to size for.
Most finance help is built for one of two extremes. There is bookkeeping, which records what already happened, and there is a full-time CFO, which starts somewhere north of a six-figure salary. Between them sits nearly every organization in the North: a non-profit running four programs on three funding agreements, a contractor with two dozen staff and a season to make the year in, a band-owned corporation reporting to a council.
All of them need a budget that holds, reporting that a board can read, and a straight answer before a decision. None of them need (or can carry) a full-time finance department.
That is the gap Frostbite Finance was built to sit in.
Where we work
Yellowknife, and the reasons that matters.
Northern economics are not southern economics with a surcharge. Funding arrives in agreements with their own reporting calendars and their own eligible-cost rules. Seasons compress the year. Freight, fuel and turnover land on a budget in ways a template does not anticipate. A reserve policy that reads as conservative in Calgary can be thin here.
We are here, so none of that has to be explained to us before the work starts.
Who we work with
If one of these is you, we are probably a fit.
- Non-profits and societies
- Multi-fund budgets, funder reporting on someone else's calendar, and a volunteer board that deserves numbers it can actually read.
- Indigenous governments and development corporations
- Reporting to councils, boards and members, across entities that each have their own obligations and their own year-end.
- Owner-run businesses
- Enough revenue that the decisions are expensive, not enough overhead to justify a controller sitting between you and them.
- Organizations mid-transition
- A finance lead who has left, a growth step that broke the old spreadsheet, or a funder who has started asking harder questions.
The boundary
What we are not.
We are not your bookkeeper. We do not enter transactions, run your payables or reconcile your bank, and where you do not have someone doing that, our first advice will be to get one.
We are not your auditor. Independence matters, and the people who prepare management numbers should not be the people who attest to the statements.
We are not financial advisors. We do not advise on investments, insurance or personal finances, and we are not registered to.
What is left is the layer none of them cover: turning a set of books into a budget, a forecast, a report and a decision. That layer is the whole job here.
The framework
The same 4S Framework, applied to the money.
Every Frostbite engagement runs on the 4S Framework (strategy, systems, staff and story) because a number that keeps going wrong is usually a symptom of one of the other three. Finance is where those problems become visible first, and where they are cheapest to catch.
Get in touch
Worth a conversation?
A finance review is the way in. It costs less than a month of doing this yourself, and it ends with a written read on what to hand over first.