Fractional CFO & Controller Services for Atlanta Businesses

Atlanta contractors are being asked to grow into work that is larger than their reporting. A mechanical contractor in Lawrenceville doing $9 million a year takes a $6 million package on a hyperscale campus in Douglas County and discovers that a tier-one general contractor's pay cycle, retainage, and compliance paperwork were designed for companies 10 times its size. The bookkeeper who was adequate at $5 million now closes the month six weeks late, the WIP schedule is a spreadsheet nobody trusts, and the owner reads cash from the bank app.

The symptoms are familiar across the metro. Receivables age past 60 days while the line of credit carries payroll. Change orders are performed in Alpharetta and never billed from the office in Marietta. The bank asks for a covenant certificate and gets a shrug. The surety caps the bonding program because the year-end statements were internally prepared and the under-billings could not be explained. Meanwhile, every construction accountant worth hiring between Kennesaw and McDonough has an offer from a data-center general contractor with a per-diem attached.

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.

Our clients are privately held companies between roughly $3 million and $50 million in revenue, owned by the people who run them. In Atlanta that means general contractors building along the Georgia 400 corridor, electrical contractors and mechanical subs on the data-center campuses in Union City, Douglasville, and south of the city, HVAC contractors and plumbing contractors running fleets out of Gwinnett and Cobb counties, site and civil contractors in Henry and Coweta counties, and the building-materials yards and distributors that supply all of them. We also serve home-services companies, professional-services firms, and logistics operators.

The situations repeat. The owner approves every check and cannot say what next month looks like. The controller left for a public company in Sandy Springs. The bank wants monthly reporting and a WIP schedule, and both are late. Revenue doubled on one data-center customer and the company is now that customer's unpaid bank. A sale, an acquisition, or a partner buyout is coming and the books would not survive a quality-of-earnings review.

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 hand them cleaner books. And if your plan is to hire a full-time CFO and hope the ledger sorts itself out before the first board meeting, we will 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 is a 13-week cash forecast updated every Monday, a bank relationship that is managed instead of endured, bid decisions made with job-margin data, and a monthly package that says where the money went and where it is going. The national fractional CFO page covers the full scope. This page is about how it works inside and outside the Perimeter.

Atlanta lenders have financed more than one building cycle, and they read WIP schedules and customer concentration closely. A sub taking data-center work needs to know, before signing, whether it can carry 90 days of labor and material ahead of a first pay application. A site contractor in Henry County needs equipment financing that matches a backlog that could halve if a moratorium passes. 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, and urgency. One-time cleanup, software, and travel to Georgia are separate unless expressly included.

A controller's job is to make the numbers true and on time. Our fractional controller closes the month within 10 business days, keeps a job-cost ledger that ties to the general ledger, produces a WIP schedule a surety can read, runs receivables and payables on a calendar, and reconciles every bank, loan, and credit-card account monthly. For a contractor that includes retainage tracking, change-order billing, lien-waiver management, and the percentage-of-completion adjustments that turn a cash-basis guess into a real margin.

In Atlanta the hard part is not the work. It is keeping the person who does it. The corporate headquarters in Midtown and along Georgia 400, the hospital systems, and the data-center general contractors 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 Marietta and McDonough.

Controller engagements start at $2,500 per month. The scope is written down on day one 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.

Georgia licenses general and residential contractors through the State Licensing Board for Residential and General Contractors, and a license is required for work above $2,500 in labor and materials combined. The license tiers carry contract limits, and building departments may not issue a permit to an unlicensed contractor above the threshold. The surety, however, is what actually governs how fast you can grow. Bonding capacity rests on a credible WIP schedule, consistent gross margin by job, working capital that is still there at year end, and an owner who can explain the numbers. We build that package and keep it current.

Georgia lien law is unforgiving about dates. A claim of lien must be filed within 90 days of the last day labor or materials were furnished, and in many cases a preliminary notice is due within 30 days of first furnishing to preserve rights against an owner who has already paid the general contractor. On a campus with three tiers between you and the owner, the calendar is the only protection a sub has. We build the notice and lien deadlines into the monthly billing process so they are tracked alongside pay applications, and your construction attorney handles the filings and the claims.

Georgia sales and use tax generally treats contractors as the consumers of the materials they install, and the treatment of exempt owners, manufacturing projects, and certain data-center equipment adds questions on every large job. We do not give tax advice. We make sure the job setup, the exemption 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.

Trouble in metro Atlanta tends to arrive in the same order. The line of credit is fully drawn by spring and stays there. Payroll taxes slip a quarter. A supplier in Norcross moves you to COD. The surety asks for an updated WIP schedule and stops returning calls. By the time the bank calls, the owner has been funding payroll from savings for months and calling 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 forecast built from actual receivables, actual payables, and 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 new. Our turnaround CFO and 13-week cash-flow forecast pages cover the mechanics.

The current cycle is split down the middle. Data-center and industrial work is running at record scale while the region lost construction jobs overall, which means a framing contractor tied to housing in Cherokee County and an electrical sub turning down work in Union City are in the same metro and different economies. Both need the same thing: a real margin by job, a forecast that goes past next Friday, and the discipline to stop taking work that loses money slowly.

The data-center wave is the defining opportunity and the defining risk. Campuses like the Microsoft site in Union City, planned at more than two million square feet, run on tier-one general contractors and payment terms written for companies far larger than a $10 million electrical sub. A sub that takes a package sized at half its annual revenue has just doubled its working-capital need, and the same wave has local and state officials weighing moratoriums that could change the pipeline. We model the cash curve of the job before you sign, size the credit line to it, and keep the forecast honest about what happens if the next phase is delayed.

Labor is the second constraint. Contractors across the region cite labor availability as the main limit on growth, and the data-center general contractors are paying per diems that pull electricians and pipefitters off ordinary commercial jobs. For a mid-sized sub that means wage inflation that was not in the bid, overtime that was not in the forecast, and turnover that resets productivity every quarter. We build labor-burden and utilization reporting by job so the squeeze shows up in the monthly package rather than at closeout.

Growth in the suburbs and exurbs is the third. Henry, Coweta, Cherokee, and Forsyth counties are absorbing new residents faster than the core, and the home-services, remodeling, and site-work companies serving them are scaling faster than their reporting. A company that doubles in two years needs credit, controls, and a close it has not earned yet. Lenders will finance that growth only when the reporting proves it is profitable growth, and in Georgia the lien calendar does not pause while the books catch up.

• Data-center subcontract packages modeled for cash before they are signed
• Georgia 90-day lien and 30-day notice deadlines built into monthly billing
• Labor-burden and utilization reporting by job to price the per-diem squeeze
• Surety and bank packages built on a credible WIP schedule and real working capital
• Contract-tier limits and licensing thresholds tracked as the company grows
• Sales-tax exemption certificates captured in job setup for the CPA
• Competition for construction accountants answered with a documented, transferable process