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Amanda Foran Strategic finance, operations & growth support for owner-operated businesses

Most owner-operators aren't bookkeepers — and they shouldn't have to be. I step in as a hands-on financial and operational partner: cleaning up the books, building the systems that make profit visible, and helping you grow into the next stage with confidence.

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LLQP Licensed Fractional CFO Multi-Platform Operations Based in Ottawa · Serving Canada-wide
Amanda Foran
Amanda Foran
The Problem

You're running a real business — but the numbers feel like a mystery.

Revenue's coming in. Crews are working. Bills are getting paid (mostly on time). And yet you can't tell from one month to the next whether you're actually making money — or which jobs, departments, or clients are dragging you under.

We've never been busier — so why are we always broke?

That's the gap I close. I work with owner-operators who've grown past the spreadsheet-on-the-truck stage but haven't yet built the financial infrastructure to make smart decisions at scale. I'm not here to take over — I'm here to give you the visibility, systems, and strategy to take it over yourself.

What I Do

Three lanes — chosen because they compound.

Strong books unlock smart growth. Smart growth funds better people and better protection. The three lanes work together — one relationship, broader range.

Strategic Finance & Operations

From cleaning up the books to acting as your fractional CFO. Scales up or down with where your business is.

  • QuickBooks setup, cleanup, ongoing categorization
  • HST, payroll & WSIB filings
  • Operational systems (Jobber, ServiceTitan, etc.)
  • SOPs & departmental workflows
  • Custom dashboards & KPI tracking
  • Monthly close + margin diagnostics
  • Cash flow forecasting & year-end strategy

Grant Writing & Procurement

Funding and contract revenue you probably qualify for. The trouble is the applications — written for businesses with internal proposal teams. I write yours.

  • Federal and provincial grant applications
  • Industry-specific funding programs
  • RFP & procurement proposal writing
  • Government / public-sector tender responses
  • Sourcing matched funding opportunities

Group Benefits & Investment Strategy

LLQP-licensed. The financial side of taking care of yourself, your family, and your team — without referring you to three different people.

  • Group employee benefits packages
  • Owner / executive life insurance
  • Critical illness & disability coverage
  • Segregated funds & investment strategy
  • Retirement & succession planning
AI Integrations

Bringing AI into how your business actually runs.

Most businesses are still copy-pasting between systems, re-writing the same monthly summaries, and answering the same questions in Slack and texts. AI doesn't replace the business — it removes the repetitive friction. I find the high-leverage places to bring it in, set it up cleanly, and make sure your team actually uses it.

Finance

Smart Books

AI-powered transaction categorization, receipt OCR auto-coding, duplicate-vendor flagging, and anomaly detection on the books — so your accountant catches the weird stuff before you do.

Knowledge

Custom Internal Assistants

A private ChatGPT-style assistant trained on your SOPs, contracts, and pricing. Your team can ask "what's our standard markup?" or "what does our contract say about change orders?" and gets your answers, not generic ones.

Reporting

Reports That Write Themselves

Instead of just numbers, an AI-generated monthly narrative that explains what changed, why, and what to watch — built from your real data, sent to the inboxes that need it.

Workflow

System Automation

Zapier and Make.com workflows that connect your job-management platform, accounting, payroll, and CRM — so data flows between systems without anyone copy-pasting between tabs at the end of the day.

Sales & Funding

Proposal & Grant AI

Custom AI tooling trained on your past winning proposals, RFPs, and grant applications — so the first draft of the next one writes itself based on your actual voice and what's worked before.

Customer-Facing

Lead, Follow-Up & Meeting AI

Automated review monitoring with draft responses, after-hours SMS lead capture, stale-quote follow-up sequences, and meeting transcription piped into action-item tracking. The "things should've been done last week" gap, closed.

Bidding

Estimating & Pricing AI

An AI assistant that drafts quotes and estimates based on your historical job data — applying the actual labour, materials, and margin patterns from completed work so new bids stop being a clean-slate exercise every time.

Data

Document & Contract AI

OCR and intelligent extraction from invoices, vendor statements, contracts, receipts, and RFP documents — structured data into your accounting and CRM without manual data entry. Especially useful when a vendor's "system" is still a PDF.

Philosophy

"AI is only worth setting up if your team actually uses it. I pick the workflows where the leverage is real and the friction is honest — and skip the ones where the demo looks great but nobody opens it twice."

How We Work Together

One partnership, four levels of depth.

Some businesses need someone to just keep the books from falling over. Others need a strategic partner at the table for every meaningful financial and operational decision. I work at every point on that spectrum — and engagement depth scales with what you actually need, not a one-size-fits-all package.

i.

Foundations

Categorization, bank reconciliation, monthly close. Get the books in shape so your accountant has something to work with at year-end and you have something to actually look at month to month.

When your QuickBooks is months behind and you don't know where to start.
ii.

Bookkeeping + Insight

Everything in Foundations plus HST and payroll oversight, custom KPIs, and a monthly P&L review with you. The books are clean — now we use them to inform real decisions.

When you have time to run the business but no time to interpret the financials.
iii.

Operations + Finance

The full package — operational system setup, SOPs for each department, custom dashboards, AR/AP management, margin diagnostics, and a profit improvement plan. Where systems start compounding into real growth.

When you're growing but losing money and don't know which jobs are draining you.
iv.

Strategic / Fractional CFO

Everything in Operations + Finance plus board-level reporting, strategic planning, financing and capital decisions, and presence at every meaningful strategic meeting. Effectively a CFO on your team without the salary, benefits, and HR overhead.

When you want a senior financial brain in every important conversation.
Who I Work With

Owner-operators ready to professionalize how they run the business.

The pattern is the same across industries: a working owner who's been holding it together with spreadsheets, gut instinct, and long nights — ready to put real systems behind the operation so the next stage of growth is sustainable.

Project-Based Businesses

Construction, contracting, custom build, landscaping, design-build, restoration. Revenue tied to discrete jobs with materials, subs, and labour to track per project.

Service & Field Operations

HVAC, plumbing, electrical, mechanical, irrigation, lawn care, snow ops, cleaning, mobile repair. Dispatched service calls and crew scheduling where margin hides in the fleet and overhead.

Specialty & Multi-Entity

Real estate operators, property management, hospitality groups, retail with multiple locations, family-held operating groups. The complexity is structural; the financial picture needs to roll up cleanly.

Software-agnostic by design

I work with stacks across the board — QuickBooks Online, Xero, Sage, Jobber, ServiceTitan, Buildertrend, Procore, Aspire, LMN, Housecall Pro, HubSpot, Salesforce, Wagepoint, ClockShark, and whatever else fits the operation. The tool isn't the point. Getting your operational and financial reality to match is.

What This Looks Like in Practice

A few patterns I see — and how the work shapes up.

No two engagements look the same. These are typical patterns, drawn as examples — not specific to any one client.

Example · Building margin visibility per job

Revenue's strong but cash never grows. Which jobs are actually making us money — and which ones are dragging us under?

A typical engagement here might involve setting up a job-management platform (Jobber, Buildertrend, Aspire, or similar) to capture materials, labour, and subs per project; building a dashboard layered on top of QuickBooks or Xero to pull in costs that don't get tagged at the job level — fuel, fleet, equipment; and walking the owner through reading margin per job, per crew, and per service line. The goal is bidding from data, not gut.

Example · Catching up multi-entity books

We're months behind in QuickBooks across multiple entities. The accountant can't close year-end until we catch up.

A catch-up project starts with reconciling every bank, credit card, and intercompany account, building automated categorization rules so the same transaction types don't have to be touched twice, and standing up a monthly close cadence the internal team can run going forward. The output is a clean financial picture across the group and an accountant who can do year-end without rebuilding the books first.

Example · Standing up a new operational platform

We're moving onto a new ops system and need to redesign how every department actually works inside it.

Implementation work like this typically involves mapping current workflows, writing SOPs by department, translating operational data into financial reporting so the leadership team can see what's working as the rollout progresses, and training staff. The win is an operations system that produces clean financial data as a byproduct of how people actually work — not as a separate exercise at the end of the month.

Example · Adding benefits and protection in one relationship

We want to offer group benefits, the owners need life insurance, and we should be thinking about retirement — but we don't even know who to ask.

With the LLQP license, I can quote and set up group benefits, structure owner-side life and disability coverage, and put together segregated-fund or other investment vehicles — all in the same relationship. One person who already knows your business, instead of three new ones who each need to be brought up to speed.

About

Why I do this.

I came up working with trades and owner-operated businesses — listening to owners describe the same problem in slightly different ways. They were busy, growing, hiring, taking work. And yet at the end of every quarter the picture was murky, the cash was tighter than expected, and the only person who could tell them why was an external accountant they spoke to once a year.

The gap isn't talent. It isn't effort. It's that nobody is sitting between operations and finance, translating one into the other in real time. Most growing businesses can't justify a full-time CFO and don't need one — but they desperately need the function. That's where I come in.

I'm hands-on. I'll set up your job-management software, write your SOPs, run your HST and WSIB filings, oversee your payroll cycle, build the dashboard you'll actually look at, and sit at the table for the big decisions. The financial license (LLQP) means I can also handle group benefits, life and disability coverage, and segregated fund investments without referring you to yet another professional.

One relationship, broader range, real partnership.

Let's Talk

Curious whether we'd be a fit?

Tell me a bit about the business and what's keeping you up at night. We'll start with a quick conversation — no charge, no pressure — to see whether what I do lines up with what you need.

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613-406-9504 · Ottawa, Ontario · Serving clients across Canada