Virtual CFO Ultimo | Sydney Virtual CFO
A virtual CFO for Ultimo founders in the UTS and Tech Central corridor: runway maths, hiring-plan models, and scenario planning when a raise slips.
Ultimo sits at the western edge of the Tech Central corridor, with UTS anchoring a dense band of startups, scale-ups and technology-adjacent businesses. The founders here spend ahead of revenue and live by two numbers: how long the cash lasts, and what the next round of hiring does to it. The third number, the one most often skipped, is what both look like if the raise lands a quarter late. A virtual CFO engagement, scoped as the 90-Day Number, builds all three into one model the founder can run.
Published: July 2026
Ultimo sits inside Tech Central, the NSW Government's six square kilometre innovation precinct bordered by Haymarket, Camperdown and South Eveleigh, which holds Australia's highest density of venture capital and its strongest concentration of technology businesses. UTS is one of the precinct's two anchor universities and has shaped the suburb for decades; City of Sydney employment data has the Harris Street village, the employment geography that covers Ultimo, holding the city's highest proportion of higher education and research jobs. Around that anchor sits a distinct density of early and growth-stage technology businesses, research spin-outs, and the services firms that grow up beside them.
The reader this page is written for is not a student founder tinkering with an idea. It is the operator running a real business, $2M revenue and up, inside or beside the corridor, who has outgrown gut-feel finance and needs the numbers that govern a scaling company. Often that founder runs software or a product business; sometimes it is an edtech, media or services firm that grew out of the university economy. The revenue model differs. The questions do not.
A business spending ahead of revenue needs more than a runway figure; it needs a decision-sensitive one. Cash divided by average burn gives a number, but the useful model shows how that number moves when something changes: a hire starts, a customer pays 30 days late, a spend gets approved. The founders who get caught are rarely the ones with no number. They are the ones with a static number that was right in March and quietly wrong by June.
Not salaries: loaded cost. Superannuation runs at 12 per cent of ordinary time earnings, and since 1 July 2026 it leaves the bank on every pay run under Payday Super rather than accruing quarterly. Add workers compensation, recruitment, equipment and ramp months, and a hiring plan priced off salaries alone understates itself by 20 per cent or more. Set against the runway, the loaded plan answers the question that matters: not "can we afford these roles" but "which order, and gated on what".
Raises slip. A model that shows only the plan is useless the moment the plan changes. The model worth building shows the spread: the business if the round lands on schedule, a quarter late, or has to be bridged, each with its own cash low point and its own decision. That spread is what scenario planning means in practice, and it is the difference between acting at month five and scrambling at month nine.
An Ultimo business at $3.5M revenue holds $2.1M in cash and burns a net $180,000 a month. The plan: four hires across two quarters, two starting in month two and two in month five, combined salaries of $480,000, loaded cost about $580,000 a year, roughly $24,000 a month per pair. A raise is pencilled for month seven, sized to buy the 18 to 24 months of runway a round is normally judged against.
Base case: burn steps from $180,000 to $204,000 in month two and $228,000 in month five. Cash bottoms out around $850,000 in month six, a little under four months of buffer at the new burn, and the raise lands on schedule. Comfortable.
Slip case: the round prices in month ten instead. Same hiring plan, and cash at the end of month nine is roughly $170,000, under one month of burn, with payroll at risk in month ten. Nothing about the business changed. A date moved.
The model turns that spread into a sequence. Hires three and four gate on a signed term sheet, not a pencilled one, which alone lifts the slip-case floor from $170,000 to about $290,000. The 13-week cashflow forecast sits underneath, flagging the specific weeks the floor gets tested. And the bridge conversation has a trigger written down in advance: if the round has not priced by month five, the founder opens it then, from a position of ten weeks of options rather than ten days. None of this required the raise to be in trouble. It required seeing the spread ten months early.
For an Ultimo founder the natural deliverable is a runway and hiring-plan model with scenario toggles, so the base case and the downside sit side by side and stay current as inputs change. Where the raise is inside a year, the same build feeds a fundraise-ready financial model, with the hiring plan and revenue assumptions already stress-tested rather than assembled in the fortnight before the first partner meeting. For a spin-out or grant-funded business, R&D refund and grant milestone timing goes into the cash model too, since a refund that lands in week 30 instead of week 18 moves the whole floor. One named deliverable, agreed on day one.
The engagement is scoped, fixed and finite. We agree the deliverable that answers your most expensive question, build it across the ninety days on top of your existing actuals, and hand it over with a working session so you can run it yourself afterwards. On day 90 you own the model. Some founders move to a light periodic check-in, some run the year on the model alone, and some come back later for a separate build. All three are correct outcomes, and none happens by default. There is no auto-renewal and no open-ended retainer.
The commercial terms are fixed: $17,850 plus GST, paid in three instalments of $5,950, one named deliverable by day 90. Most Australian virtual CFO work is sold the other way, as an open-ended monthly retainer typically in the $3,000 to $8,000 per month band with no named deliverable and no end date. Project-based virtual CFO work is rare in this market. We think the reasons most firms avoid it, the scoping is harder and the founder gets to leave at day 90, are also the reasons it is the better product.
If the raise is the live question, the guide to fundraise-ready financial models for Australian founders covers what investors actually test.
If you already have a bookkeeper, keep them. This work sits on the decision layer, on top of clean actuals; it does not replace reconciliation, payroll or compliance. If the ledger is not trustworthy, fix the ledger first, then build the forward view, because a scenario model built on bad actuals is theatre. And if the business is under $2M revenue, the 90-Day Number is usually the wrong spend at this stage; run a simple cash tracker and revisit once the decisions get expensive enough to justify the build.
Founders a few blocks away face the same shape of problem with different textures: the tech and media corridor in Pyrmont, the services firms in the Sydney CBD, the studio businesses toward Glebe, and the South Eveleigh cluster in Redfern. The deliverable that fits is the one that answers the question that is actually expensive right now.
What makes runway modelling useful rather than just a number?
The value is seeing how your decisions move the runway, not the single figure. A good model lets you toggle a hire, a spend or a slipped raise and watch the months of cash change, so decisions get sequenced safely. A static runway number tells you where you are; a decision-sensitive model tells you what to do next, and keeps telling you as the inputs change.
Why does scenario planning around the raise matter so much?
Because raises frequently slip, and a plan-only model breaks the moment they do. Modelling the base case alongside a round landing a quarter late, or needing a bridge, shows the cash low point each path creates and the date each decision has to be made by. That lets you stage hiring against the raise rather than committing ahead of money that has not arrived.
Is a $2M business too small for this?
No. $2M and up is exactly the band this work serves: below the scale of a $200,000-plus full-time CFO hire, past the point where gut-feel finance is safe. A fixed-scope engagement builds the runway and hiring model without the cost of a permanent hire, and the deliverable is yours afterwards.
How is this different from a generic startup finance service?
The corridor shapes the work. Tech Central founders are typically scaling or raising, so the deliverables centre on runway, loaded hiring cost and raise scenarios rather than bookkeeping-plus-advice, and the engagement is built around the two or three decisions actually in front of the founder. It is also project-based, which most of this market is not.
We spun out of university research. Does the model handle grants and R&D refunds?
Yes, as cashflow. Grant milestones and R&D refund timing go into the model as dated receipts with slip scenarios, because a refund landing a quarter late moves the whole cash floor. The tax side of those claims stays with your registered tax agent; the model handles what the timing does to your runway.
Do you handle our accounting and payroll?
No. Those stay with your bookkeeper and payroll provider. The virtual CFO works on the decision layer, runway, hiring economics and raise scenarios, on top of your existing records. If the records are not clean, fixing them comes first.
What does it cost?
The 90-Day Number is a fixed $17,850 plus GST for one named deliverable by day 90, paid in three instalments of $5,950. There is no retainer and no "from" pricing. The common Australian alternative is an open-ended monthly retainer at $3,000 to $8,000; the project-based model is deliberately different and rare in this market.
What happens after the engagement?
You keep the model and run it yourself; the final working session exists for exactly that. If the raise proceeds and you need the full fundraise-ready model, that is scoped as a separate engagement rather than an automatic continuation. There is no default roll-on.
Sydney Virtual CFO is a Sydney-based virtual CFO service for founders running $2M to $15M businesses across SaaS, ecommerce, professional services, construction, and other low-volume, high-value industries. We deliver fixed-scope CFO engagements with a named deliverable on day 90: a 13-week cashflow forecast, a fundraise-ready financial model, a unit economics build, or a board reporting pack you can run on your own.
Our front-door product, the 90-Day Number, is fixed scope at $17,850 plus GST. We are one of the few project-based virtual CFOs in Australia, in a market built almost entirely on monthly retainers. No retainers without a deliverable. No 80-page reports. No theatre.
Visit Sydney Virtual CFO | The 90-Day Number | Book a Call
This content is general information only, written for Australian founders running businesses in the $2M to $15M revenue range. It does not constitute tax, financial product, investment, or legal advice and should not be relied on as such. The work referenced is led by a Chartered Accountant (CA ANZ), but Sydney Virtual CFO is not a licensed tax agent, not a licensed financial adviser, and not authorised to provide personal financial advice. Tax obligations, accounting treatments, fundraise terms, and statutory requirements depend on your individual circumstances. For advice specific to your business, contact the team directly or consult a registered tax agent, licensed financial adviser, or qualified lawyer. Information was current at the time of publication and may change without notice. We review and update guides periodically.
