Paris · Situation
Raising capital in Paris
Fundraising fails on preparation far more often than on the business. The model does not reconcile to the accounts, the cohort data does not exist, the cap table has an old convertible nobody modelled, and the founder spends the diligence period building things they should have had a year ago.
This is the single most common trigger for a first fractional CFO. The mandate has a defined start and a defined end, and the person who runs it should have sat on the other side of the table.
What this calls for
- A financial model that reconciles to the statutory accounts
- Historic cohort, retention and unit economics data
- A clean cap table with all instruments modelled through to exit
- A data room built before diligence starts, not during it
- Someone who can hold the diligence conversation without the founder in the room
What is specific to France
- Employer contributions are largely uncapped above the plafond, so on-costs scale with executive pay rather than flattening out — the opposite of Thailand, where they are effectively nil at CFO level.
- Exiting a French executive is expensive by design: a 30% employer contribution on rupture conventionnelle indemnities, and up to twenty months of salary at the prud’hommes if it goes wrong. A prestation de services ends on notice.
- The subsidiary audit thresholds — EUR 5m revenue, EUR 2.5m balance sheet, 25 employees — pull small French entities of foreign groups into a real reporting obligation years before they have the finance team to meet it.
- The expert-comptable is the incumbent adviser and is deeply embedded — often the only external financial voice the patron has heard for a decade. A fractional DAF who arrives positioned against the expert-comptable loses. One who arrives as the person who turns the expert-comptable’s output into decisions gets in the door.
The Paris numbers
Fractional, per monthEUR 5,000–12,000 a month (USD 5,800–14,000), typically EUR 7,000–9,200 at two days a week for an expert-level DAF, with Île-de-France carrying a 10–15% premium over the rest of the country. Day rates run EUR 600–1,000 for a DAF à temps partagé. Management de transition is a different product at a different price: EUR 900–1,200 a day for a confirmed profile, EUR 1,200–1,500 senior, and EUR 1,600–1,800 in the top quartile — a six-month full-time mandate lands at EUR 110,000–200,000. Advisory-only, a board pack and a monthly call, runs EUR 1,800–3,500.
Full-time, all-inBase EUR 110,000–180,000 for a Paris DAF in a mid-market company; Île-de-France pays 10–20% above the rest of France. All-in with employer contributions, bonus, mutuelle, prévoyance and a car, EUR 175,000–290,000 a year — roughly USD 205,000–340,000. A group DAF with fifteen years behind them reaches EUR 300,000 base alone.
SeveranceIndemnité légale de licenciement, art. R1234-2: one quarter of a month per year for the first ten years, one third thereafter — modest on its own. The real exposure is elsewhere. A rupture conventionnelle carries a 30% employer contribution on the exempt portion since 1 September 2023, and the negotiated figure for a DAF is customarily several times the legal minimum. If it goes to the conseil de prud’hommes instead, the barème Macron (art. L1235-3) runs from one month at under a year of service to twenty months at thirty years — and does not apply at all where the dismissal is null, which uncaps it.