For businesses that move fast

A modern fractional CFO, with AI built in.

Portway is a fractional CFO for businesses that move fast. We bring senior finance expertise, then use AI to automate the parts that should not need a person. Full CFO command of your numbers, without a full-time hire.

Start a conversation Scroll ↓
01 · the reality

Most companies do not fail for lack of a good idea. They fail because the finances slip out of view. US Bureau of Labor Statistics data shows that roughly one in five new businesses is gone within a year, nearly half within five years, and about two thirds within ten. The pattern underneath is familiar. The numbers stop being clear, decisions start getting made on guesswork, and small problems that were cheap to fix early quietly turn expensive. That is the gap we close. A senior finance partner, plus the automation to keep it running, so your numbers stay clear enough to act on.

02 · when business leaders call us

You might recognise one of these.

It takes a week to close the books every month, and by then the numbers are too old to be useful.

An investor or your board asked for a forecast, and producing it means days of manual work.

You cannot say for certain which clients or products actually make you money.

Cash flow is a mystery until it becomes a problem.

Someone is still copying numbers between the billing tool, the accounting system, and a spreadsheet, which keeps everything manual and one typo away from costing you money.

Nobody has time to improve how things work. The team is buried in routine tasks, and you can feel how much faster the business should be running.

The process is either manual or it lives with the one person who knows how to work a system that constantly gives trouble.

You are paying for software nobody really uses, or using a fraction of what you already pay for.

03 · the process

We optimize and automate finance. First we make it work properly, then we automate what is left. Here is how that goes in practice.

01

Understand

We start with what you actually have. The numbers, the tools, the processes, and where the time really goes.

02

Plan

You see the plan before anything moves. We agree it together, so it fits the way your business actually runs.

03

Build

We clean up what is broken, put the automated structure in its place, and make sure it holds under real use.

04

Monitor

We stay with it after launch, collecting results and your feedback. You end up with a system that works, not a report that gets filed.

We help you optimize and automate your operations, gain real financial clarity, unlock new strategic insight, forecast growth and cash flow, build the financial models behind big decisions, and scale without losing control of the numbers.

Fractional CFO Financial modelling Cash flow forecasting Board & investor reporting KPI dashboards Operations automation AI workflows
04 · the work
IT Services Company · Germany Financial operations
Before
Every month, invoicing was done by hand. One skipped rule meant either billing a client twice or letting real hours go unpaid.
After
A single guided system now turns raw time logs into finished, branded invoices, with the checks and the paper trail you would expect from a proper finance team.
Real Estate Startup · Brazil Financial data
Before
The founder was copying bank and card statements into a spreadsheet by hand, and had fallen months behind. The company was, in effect, flying blind.
After
The numbers now flow into the books on their own, with automated checks that catch anything off before it becomes a problem, so nothing quietly drifts out of date again.
IT Services Company · Germany Marketing operations
Before
Marketing material was built one piece at a time, each from scratch, each waiting on the one person with design skills who was already busy.
After
A set of reusable branded templates now carries the load. The team produces sharp, on-brand collateral on its own, at a pace a single designer could never match.

You can't set a course from a position you can't see.

05 · our view on AI

AI is changing how few people it takes to run a company well.

200,000
copies of a superhuman coder · 30× human speed Projected inside a single AI lab by 2027 in the widely cited AI 2027 forecast. A projection, not a promise, but the direction is hard to argue with.

You do not have to believe the exact date to see where this points. The cost of competent thinking is falling fast. Work that used to take a team, the reconciliations, the reporting, the slow manual middle of a business, is turning into something a well built system handles on its own, at a pace no department can match.

Used well, that is the biggest tailwind a small company has ever had. Most will miss it, because AI dropped into a broken process only makes you wrong faster. It needs someone who understands the numbers and the operations underneath before deciding what to hand over. That is our part. We bring the judgment, the machine carries the load, and you get the output of a much larger team without the cost of one.

The productivity is there for the taking. The question is who sets it up.

06 · the team

We think in whole systems. People in finance tend to see the numbers. People in operations see the process. We have never been able to look at one without the other, and that turned out to be the useful part.

A business is one machine. The numbers, the operations, and the decisions are the same story told three ways. Most advice fixes one and quietly breaks the other two. Our job is to hold all of it at once, and to leave the place clearer than we found it.

Portway Advisory was founded by Rafael Almeida, who has worked across finance, asset management, consulting, and technology over the past 13 years. He built a financial institution's operations department from scratch, ran the operation, and turned manual, error-prone processes into systems that hold.

The person who scopes your work is the person who does it. Nothing gets quietly handed to a junior you never meet.

MBA, ESADE Barcelona Economics, IBMEC CFA candidate Four languages Based in Germany, working worldwide
Rafael Almeida, founder of Portway Advisory
Rafael Almeida
Founder

A short conversation,
at no cost.

No pitch, and no proposal until you actually want one. Just a straight look at your business, and at least one thing worth keeping, whether we end up working together or not.

Start a conversation