Fractional CFO & Controller Services for Phoenix Businesses

Phoenix companies rarely fail from lack of work. They fail from the distance between the work and the accounting. Construction employment in the metro rose 2.0 percent year over year through December 2025, and the projects keep getting bigger. An electrical contractor doing $6 million a year that wins a $4 million package on an industrial job in Goodyear has just doubled its working-capital need, and nobody told the bank. The bookkeeper who was fine at $3 million is now closing the books six weeks late, the WIP schedule is a spreadsheet nobody trusts, and the owner reads cash from the bank app.

The symptoms are familiar. Receivables age past 60 days while the line of credit covers payroll. Job margins look fine at bid and vanish at closeout because change orders were performed and never billed. The lender asks for a covenant certificate and gets a shrug. The QuickBooks file has three versions, and the one the bank saw is not the one the owner uses. Meanwhile, every controller in the Valley worth hiring already has two offers, and the second one is from a hospital system with a signing bonus.

The fix follows a sequence. Assess what is actually true about cash, margin, and debt. Clean up the ledger so the numbers can be believed. Stabilize the weekly cash cycle and the monthly close. Document the process so it survives without us. Then transition it to your team or to a full-time hire when the company can support one. That sequence, Assess, Clean up, Stabilize, Document, Transition, is how a $3 million company becomes a $15 million company without the accounting department becoming the reason it stalls.

Our clients are privately held companies between roughly $3 million and $50 million in revenue, owned by the people who run them. In Phoenix that means general contractors in Chandler and Tempe, mechanical and HVAC contractors running a fleet out of Glendale, electrical and plumbing subs working the industrial corridors in Goodyear, Tolleson, and Deer Valley, homebuilders and land developers in Buckeye and Queen Creek, and the building-materials yards and distributors that supply all of them. We also work with home-services companies, professional-services firms, and the contractors who are suddenly tier-two suppliers to a semiconductor campus and are learning what that paperwork looks like.

The situations repeat. The owner still approves every check and reads cash from the bank balance. The controller left, or was never really a controller. The bank wants monthly covenant reporting and a WIP schedule, and both are late. A surety has capped the bonding program until the financials are credible. Revenue doubled in two years and the close, the billing, and the collections did not. A sale, an acquisition, or a partner buyout is coming and the books would not survive diligence. Or cash is short, vendors are calling, and the owner needs a real plan rather than a pep talk.

You should hire someone else if you need bookkeeping alone, tax preparation, an audit opinion, or legal advice. We coordinate with the people who do those things and we stay in our lane. And if your plan is to hire a full-time CFO and hope the books fix themselves, we will happily talk you out of it on the first call, at no charge.

A fractional CFO gives you the judgment of a chief financial officer for a fraction of the week and a fraction of the cost. In practice that means a 13-week cash-flow forecast updated every Monday, a bank relationship that is managed rather than endured, pricing and bid decisions made with margin data instead of instinct, and a monthly package that tells you where the money went and where it is going. The national overview of our fractional CFO service covers the full scope. This page is about how it works in the Valley.

Phoenix lenders have lived through more than one building cycle and they read WIP schedules carefully. Equipment finance for a fleet that runs hot for a third of the year needs a replacement schedule, not a reaction. Contractors bidding on semiconductor supplier work or on the industrial projects in the Southwest Valley need to know, before they sign, whether they can fund 90 days of labor and material ahead of a first pay application. Those are CFO questions. We answer them with a model, a bank conversation, and a decision, usually in the same week.

Engagements start at $3,500 per month for a Fractional CFO and $8,500 per month for an Operating CFO who owns the finance function day to day. CFO Advisory starts at $5,000, Embedded CFO at $12,500, and interim leadership is custom. Those are starting points, not quotes. Final pricing reflects company size, entity count, transaction volume, the condition of the books, urgency, and how much the bank and surety are asking for. One-time cleanup, software, and travel outside the metro are separate unless expressly included.

A controller's job is to make the numbers true and on time. Ours close the month within 10 business days, maintain a job-cost ledger that ties to the general ledger, produce a WIP schedule the surety can read, run receivables and payables on a calendar instead of a mood, and reconcile every bank, loan, and credit-card account monthly. For a contractor that includes retainage tracking, change-order billing, and the percentage-of-completion adjustments that turn a cash-basis guess into a real margin.

In the Valley the hard part is not the work. It is finding someone who can do it and keeping them. Health care, the semiconductor supply chain, and the large public homebuilders all hire from the same pool of construction accountants, and a $10 million contractor cannot outbid them for long. A fractional controller solves that by running the function and documenting it, so the next hire inherits a process instead of a mystery. We work in QuickBooks, Sage 300 CRE, ServiceTitan, JD Edwards, and Power BI, which covers most of what is installed between Surprise and Gilbert.

Controller engagements start at $2,500 per month. The scope is written down on day one, the close calendar is published, and the deliverables are the same every month: financial statements, job-cost reports, WIP, aging, and a cash position you can read in five minutes. When the company is ready for a full-time controller, the documented process goes with the job. Fix it. Run it. Document it. Hand it off.

Arizona licenses contractors through the Registrar of Contractors, and the license bond is sized to your classification and your anticipated annual gross volume. Grow past the volume you declared and the bond needs to grow with you. Surety capacity for project bonds is a separate and larger matter, and it rests almost entirely on the quality of your financial statements: a credible WIP schedule, consistent gross margins by job, working capital that does not evaporate at year end, and an owner who can explain the numbers. We build the package the surety and the bank want to see, and we keep it current so the next bid is not held up by the last close.

Arizona also taxes construction differently from most states. The transaction privilege tax on prime contracting is measured on gross receipts, labor included, and materials for modification projects are generally purchased tax-exempt, with a distinction between maintenance, repair, replacement, and alteration work on one side and new construction on the other that changes who owes what. Getting the classification wrong on a large job is expensive in both directions. We do not give tax advice. We do make sure the job setup, the subcontractor certificates, and the ledger capture what your CPA needs to file correctly, and we get the CPA in the room before the first invoice goes out.

On large industrial and semiconductor-related projects, a specialty sub can sit three tiers below the owner. Pay-when-paid clauses, retainage, and long approval chains mean the cash arrives months after the labor was paid. Preliminary notice deadlines and lien rights are the only real protection a sub has, and they expire on a calendar. Our principal has managed mechanic's liens, claims, and litigation support coordination for multi-entity contractors, and we build the notice calendar into the billing process rather than treating it as a legal afterthought.

Trouble in the Valley usually announces itself in the same order. The line of credit is fully drawn in April and stays that way. Payroll taxes slip a quarter. Vendors move you to COD. The surety asks for an updated WIP and does not like it. By the time the bank calls, the owner has been funding the business from personal savings for six months and calls it a bridge. None of that is fatal if someone takes control of cash in the next two weeks.

We start with a 13-week cash-flow forecast built from the actual receivables, the actual payables, and the actual payroll, not the budget. Then vendor triage: who gets paid, when, and what they are told. Then a lender conversation with a plan attached, because banks extend patience to borrowers who show up with numbers. The principal has led finance through a Chapter 11 process, including debtor-in-possession operations and court-required reporting, so nothing on the list will be the first time. Our turnaround CFO and 13-week cash-flow forecast pages cover the mechanics.

The current cycle is uneven. Single-family permits across the metro were down 14.8 percent year over year on a trailing-12-month basis as of July 2026, while industrial construction under way rose to 18.4 million square feet. A framing contractor tied to new residential is resizing at the same time an electrical sub is turning down work. Both need the same thing: a real margin by job, a cash forecast that goes past next Friday, and the discipline to stop taking work that loses money slowly. One of these companies is about to discover its best customer was never profitable, and it is better to find out in a spreadsheet.

Heat is a line item. Phoenix Sky Harbor recorded 122 days at or above 100 degrees in 2025, against a post-1990 average of 111, and 2025 was the second-hottest year on record. For a field company that means split shifts, early starts, more crew hours per unit of work, water and cooling costs, and equipment that fails in August far more often than it does in March. Productivity assumptions in a bid made in February do not survive July unless someone priced the heat. We build seasonal labor-burden and equipment-repair curves into the forecast so the summer margin squeeze is planned rather than discovered.

HVAC and home-services companies live the mirror image. Demand and cash arrive in a summer wave, the winter is thin, and the equipment inventory for the season is bought before the season pays for it. The right structure is a maintenance-agreement base that smooths revenue, a supplier credit line sized to the pre-season buy, and a cash forecast that carries the company from October to May without a panic. Rapid growth adds a second problem: a company doubling revenue needs working capital it has not earned yet, and lenders will finance growth only when the reporting proves it is profitable growth.

Developers and homebuilders carry a challenge particular to this metro: water. Since 2023 the Arizona Department of Water Resources has generally declined new assured water supply determinations for subdivisions in the Phoenix Active Management Area that rely solely on groundwater, which pushed projects toward alternative supplies and a new alternative designation pathway. A 2026 superior court ruling challenged the underlying rule, and the situation remains in motion. For a land developer the financial implication is simple even when the policy is not: water supply is a cost, a schedule risk, and a lender question, and it belongs in the pro forma with its own line. We model it that way.

• Heat-season labor cost, split shifts, and equipment failure priced into bids and forecasts
• Seasonal HVAC and home-services cash cycles smoothed with agreements and pre-season credit
• Growth financing sized to the working capital a larger backlog actually requires
• Pay-when-paid, retainage, and notice deadlines built into billing on large projects
• ROC license bonds and surety capacity supported by credible WIP and financial statements
• Water supply, land entitlement, and infrastructure cost modeled for developers
• Competition for construction accounting talent answered with a documented, transferable process