When Barry Hynd describes his work as a fractional CFO, he uses a simple phrase: "connecting finance to strategy."
Barry bridges the gap between bookkeeping and executive decision-making. The strategic work that helps business owners make confident choices and sleep peacefully at night.
And for every single one of his clients—from digital marketing agencies to tech companies—that work starts with cash flow.
"For every single client, every single client needs cash flow," Barry says. "Every client's different, dependent on their attitudes towards cash and also how much cash they've got."
Some are startups building a runway to reach their next funding round. Others are cash-rich businesses trying to figure out how to invest that money to grow. But increasingly, Barry works with a third category: profitable companies that can't understand why their bank balance keeps shrinking.
"Everybody knows you don't go out of business not making profit," Barry explains. "You go out of business running out of cash."
For years, diagnosing those problems meant one thing: Excel. Lots of it.
Before Float, Barry's cash flow forecasting process was straightforward but painfully time-consuming.
"It was just an abundance of spreadsheets," he recalls. "Just Excel, crunching numbers, very, very labour intensive."
How labour intensive?
"You weren't spending 15-20 minutes like you would now," Barry says. "It was 2, 3, 4 hours."
And that was per client.
Barry's sweet spot for client numbers is around five, though he's handled up to eight at once. "Eight's difficult," he admits, "and especially eight cash flows as well."
The reality of managing multiple clients with spreadsheets meant his Mondays disappeared into manual inspections rather than focusing on high-value strategic work.
"Your Monday would nearly always be checking back on things from the previous week," Barry explains. "Inspecting what you expect to happen and then reacting to it."
Every forecast was bespoke. Every assumption was manual. Barry had to roll numbers forward, model scenarios, and build confidence in the data—all by hand.
"There wasn't really any efficiency in it," he admits. "You were the efficiency. You were the person that tried to roll things forward, look at things over a longer period. You had to make the assumptions in terms of where things would go."
The spreadsheets were crude. The process was inflexible. And the math was brutal: even at five clients, spending 2-4 hours per forecast meant losing entire days to manual cash flow work.
"You couldn't work with 20 clients," Barry says. "Everything was limited because it was all a function of time ultimately. Because there was only so much you could speed things up."
Barry's search for Float didn't come from a crisis moment. It came from watching technology evolve—and recognising that the constraints he'd accepted for years didn't have to exist anymore.
"I think the tipping point for me was when technology started to change," Barry explains. "I was probably one of the first converts to Xero in the UK."
Before cloud accounting, everything was local. Moving data between locations meant physically carrying it on USB sticks.
"That's not particularly sustainable," Barry says.
But Xero changed the game. With the bank reconciliation at its core and the ability to pull data in real-time, something fundamental shifted.
"Cash just became real-time and things that you never thought were possible suddenly became possible," Barry recalls. "So it was an evolution of accounting systems becoming cloud-based and then going, 'What's the next bit of the stack to add on to that?'"
For Barry, the answer was obvious.
"Cash for me was the next logical step," he says. "Right, that's the accounting bit done, that's the main basics done. The next part is, how do we solve the cash problem then?"
The problem was clear: spreadsheets were slowing everything down.
"If it's taking up too much time, it's slowing down decisions," Barry explains. "We're not getting the right insights into it either. That's always the case with spreadsheets—they're pretty flat, they're pretty fixed. You get some insight in it, but the insight comes from the person that's doing the cash flow, not necessarily the program."
Barry's approach is proactive, not reactive. As a fractional CFO, he sees it as part of his job.
"Your job is to protect risk ultimately," he says. "I always try to be proactive. I will spend time every week testing software, from the point of view of being ahead and trying to understand—can that benefit customers? Can it benefit clients? Does it benefit me?"
When he started looking, he didn't have to search far.
"You don't have to go very far before you find Float, particularly on cash flow," Barry says.
With Float, the transformation was immediate.
Barry's requirements were simple: he wanted a tool that could give him insights quicker and that could do it faster and more accurately than he was doing with spreadsheets.
"Now it takes me 15, 20 minutes to look at a scenario and pull it out of Float," Barry says. "It's literally just point and click."
That time reduction—from 2-4 hours down to 15-20 minutes—freed up more than 10 hours every week. Hours Barry could reinvest in strategic work, client relationships, and growing his practice.
But the impact of Float went beyond time savings.
Not every business owner immediately understands what a fractional CFO does differently than an accountant. Barry often encounters scepticism.
"People can be sceptical of the role that we do and struggle with the bridge between accountant and CFO," he explains. "A lot of people think that my accountant does this stuff."
Float became his tool to demonstrate the difference.
"Float's really good at saying, 'Well, I've done a 13-week cash flow for you. I've done some analysis on some scenarios. Here's the reporting for it. Does your accountant do that?'" Barry says.
"And it's nearly always no."
The professional reporting Float generates doesn't just deliver insights—it demonstrates Barry's value instantly.
Some of Barry's most powerful client moments happen when Float reveals problems business owners didn't know existed.
"You sometimes get clients who think they know what their cash is," Barry says, "and then you go in with Float and say it's nothing like what you think it is. It's completely different."
When profitable companies struggle for cash, Barry knows exactly where to look.
"When somebody's saying to you, 'Yeah, I've got profit, but I've not got cash,' there's something wrong with the timing of how your cash is working," he explains. "That's what Float will help me figure out, almost entirely. It's how you're either taking too long to collect your money or you're paying people too quick."
"It's Float that will uncover that."
One recent example demonstrates exactly how Float transforms Barry's ability to diagnose and solve cash problems.
A relatively small business came to Barry with a cash flow crisis. They couldn't understand why they were constantly stretched, despite being profitable.
Barry used Float to model their cash flow and quickly identified the issue: the business was on accrual-based VAT accounting, which meant they were paying VAT to HMRC before their customers had actually paid them.
"Debtors were paying a wee bit slower than they should," Barry explains. "So they're ultimately paying the VAT over before they're getting paid from their customer."
The solution? Change their VAT accounting from accrual-based to cash-based.
Barry modelled the change quickly in Float to show the client the impact.
"I solved their entire problem in 20 minutes," he says. "The impact was about 50 grand a quarter of a change. And that's just one thing, doing one small change, and you can affect the entire business."
The ability to visualise that impact was crucial—especially for a business owner who wasn't comfortable with spreadsheets.
"The ability for Float to be able to say, 'Once we do that, this is what happens'—that's hugely powerful," Barry explains. "It's fine and well doing it on a spreadsheet, but not everybody's a spreadsheet person. More people are visual. That's where Float bridges the gap for me."
When clients aren't getting it from a spreadsheet, Barry switches to Float for optimal visualisation.
"Being able to visualise it and say, and kind of verbalise, 'This is what's gonna happen,' and showing the nice graphs and stuff like that—if I think a customer's not getting it when you're laying a spreadsheet in front of them, right, let's switch this up. Let's go into Float and let's show you what this looks like more visually."
Barry isn't someone who stays loyal to software just because he's always used it.
"I'm not overly loyal from the point of view of it's a software product," he admits. "Ultimately, if something better comes out, you always look at it."
He's constantly evaluating alternatives. It's part of his job.
"I am somebody who is out and it's always incumbent on me to find the best tool," Barry says.
But after years of looking, nothing has come close to Float.
"It's never been like that from Float."
What makes Float different? According to Barry, it's the singular focus.
"It just does cash flow," he explains. "It's not trying to do anything that it can't do. It just does what it does really, really well. It knows it, it understands it, it lives it and it breathes it."
"There's other products that bolt it on, that will say we do cash flow, but it's not the same as Float. Float just does cash flow really well."
In a market full of tools claiming to do everything—and AI promising to solve every problem—Barry values software that does one thing brilliantly.
"AI will solve everything, but in my experience it doesn't really solve very much at the minute," Barry says. "It's a bit of a white elephant for me, in particular at finance stuff."
Barry has also learned to be sceptical of integration promises.
"A lot of people will say we've got lots of integration, but I've learned through experience that integration means different things to different people and it means different things to different software products as well," he explains.
Float's direct connection to Xero and QuickBooks—and its singular focus on cash flow—is exactly what Barry needs.
When asked if he'd recommend Float to other fractional CFOs, Barry's answer is unequivocal.
"If you want to manage cash and you want good insights into cash, it's Float," he says. "I've not seen a better tool, and I am somebody who is always out there looking for the best tool."
For Barry, Float isn't just another tool. It's essential.
"Float should be part of every fractional CFO stack," he says. "It's that sort of thing that you'll always take with you everywhere because you'll always need it."
When other fractional CFOs ask him for cash flow tool recommendations, his response is consistent.
"Anybody came to me and said, 'I'm trying to find a cash flow tool,' the first words out of my mouth would be, 'You've not found Float yet?'"
Barry has also noticed how Float has built loyalty—not through lock-in or clever marketing, but through product quality and customer involvement.
"There probably is a bit more loyalty for me in Float than what there is for a lot of things, but it's because of how you've built it and how you've run it," Barry explains. "The other part of it is the stuff that you're doing around making people feel included. I've fed in a few times on where Float's going as well."
And when asked about selling Float to clients, Barry's answer is simple:
"You don't have to sell Float. It sells itself."
For fractional CFOs juggling multiple clients, facing sceptical prospects, and helping business owners who can't sleep at night because of cash problems, Float isn't just another tool.
It's the difference between spending your day buried in spreadsheets and spending it doing the strategic work you were hired to do.
It's the difference between taking 4 hours to build a forecast and taking 15 minutes.
It's the difference between explaining a cash problem with a spreadsheet and showing the solution visually in a way that makes business owners say, "Now I get it."
As Barry puts it: "If cash is important, then you have to manage it. And if you're managing it, I've not seen a better tool."
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Barry Hynd is a fractional CFO specialising in digital marketing agencies and technology companies. With over 20 years' experience in finance, he helps business owners connect finance to strategy and manage cash flow with confidence.
Float helps finance professionals build short-term cash flow forecasts with data from Xero and QuickBooks, visualise scenarios, and identify new opportunities. Discover why fractional CFOs call Float "the tool they'll always take with them."
