Fractional CFO & Controller Services for Austin Businesses

Austin companies rarely fail for lack of demand. They fail because revenue doubled and the accounting did not. An HVAC contractor in Cedar Park that grew from $4 million to $11 million in three years is still closing the books in the owner's spare time, the WIP schedule lives in a spreadsheet nobody trusts, and the credit line that was generous at $4 million is a rounding error at $11 million. The bank asks for a covenant certificate and gets a delay.

The symptoms repeat across the metro. Receivables age while payroll grows every two weeks. A professional-services firm on the Domain side of town has 40 employees, no controller, and a founder who reads cash from the bank app. A site contractor in Kyle has three subdivisions under way and cannot say which one is making money. Meanwhile, every controller worth hiring in Travis and Williamson counties has an offer from a chipmaker's supplier, a software company, or a hospital system, and a $10 million contractor cannot match the equity.

The fix is 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. Growth companies that skip the middle steps hire a CFO into a mess and lose a year.

Our clients are privately held companies between roughly $3 million and $50 million in revenue, owned by the people who run them. In Austin that means general contractors building along the MoPac and Interstate 35 corridors, electrical contractors and mechanical subs on the semiconductor and data-center sites in Taylor and Pflugerville, HVAC contractors and plumbing contractors running fleets out of Round Rock and Buda, site and civil contractors in Hays and Williamson counties, homebuilders and land developers in Leander and Georgetown, and the professional-services and home-services companies that grow with all of them.

The situations repeat. The founder is the finance department. The controller left for a tech company with equity. The bank wants monthly reporting and a WIP schedule, and both are late. A surety has capped bonding because the year-end statements could not explain the under-billings. Revenue tripled and the company is funding growth on the credit card float. An investor, a partner buyout, or an acquisition is coming and the books would not survive diligence.

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 raise a round and let the new CFO sort out the ledger, 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, pricing and hiring decisions made with 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 between Georgetown and San Marcos.

Austin's growth companies need a CFO for questions that do not come up in a stable market. A contractor bidding semiconductor supplier work needs to know, before signing, whether it can carry 90 days of labor and material ahead of a first pay application. A services firm hiring 15 people a quarter needs a headcount plan tied to collections rather than to optimism. A developer in Williamson County needs a lot-takedown schedule that survives a slower absorption pace. 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 Austin 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 or project 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 growth company that also means revenue recognition that matches the contracts, a payroll and benefits reconciliation that keeps up with hiring, and a chart of accounts that will survive the next system.

In Austin the hard part is not the work. It is keeping the person who does it. Software companies, semiconductor suppliers, and the hospital systems hire from the same pool of accountants and pay in equity a contractor cannot match. 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.

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, project 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.

Texas issues no statewide general contractor license. Air conditioning and refrigeration contractors and electrical contractors are licensed through the Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation, plumbing contractors through the Texas State Board of Plumbing Examiners, and the City of Austin and the fast-growing suburbs each add their own registration and permitting. The gate on growth is the surety, and on semiconductor and data-center sites it is the owner's prequalification. Both rest on a credible WIP schedule, consistent gross margin by job, and working capital that is still there at year end. We build that package and keep it current.

Texas lien law runs on a calendar. For original contracts signed on or after January 1, 2022, a subcontractor on a nonresidential project preserves its rights by sending notice to the owner and the original contractor by the 15th day of the third month after each month it furnished labor or materials; on residential work it is the 15th day of the second month. A sub three tiers down on a fab site has no other protection, and the date does not move. We build the notice calendar into the billing process, and your construction attorney reviews the rest.

Texas sales tax on construction turns on how the contract is written. A lump-sum contract makes the contractor the consumer of its materials; a separated contract makes it a retailer that collects tax on incorporated materials, and nonresidential repair and remodeling is taxable regardless of form. We do not give tax advice. We make sure job setup, contract form, and the ledger capture what your CPA needs, and we get the CPA in the room before the first invoice goes out.

Trouble in a growth market looks like success until it does not. The credit line is fully drawn to fund hiring. Payroll taxes slip a quarter because the deposit felt optional. A supplier in Pflugerville 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.

Austin's cycle has two speeds. Industrial vacancy sat at 21.4 percent at midyear 2026 and office vacancy at 20.6 percent, which means the developers and the finish trades tied to speculative space are resizing while the semiconductor, airport, and transit work runs hot. A drywall contractor with one foot in each is starving one division to feed the other. Both need a real margin by job, a forecast that goes past next Friday, and the discipline to stop taking work that loses money slowly.

Semiconductor work changes the arithmetic. The Taylor fab is now expected to begin production in 2027, with a second fab set to start construction by the end of 2026, and the subcontractors on those sites are working for tier-one general contractors with pay cycles and compliance requirements built for companies far larger than a $12 million mechanical sub. A package sized at half your annual revenue doubles your working-capital need. We model the cash curve before you sign, size the credit line to it, and keep the forecast honest about schedule slips, because on a fab site a slip is a season.

Labor is the second constraint. Local trade contractors report taking 30 to 90 days to hire a qualified applicant, and every large project on the Interstate 35 corridor is bidding for the same electricians and pipefitters. For a mid-sized contractor 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 itself is the third. Hays and Williamson 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, and a lender will finance that growth only when the reporting proves it is profitable. Somewhere between Leander and Buda an owner is about to learn that his fastest-growing service line has never made money.

• Semiconductor and data-center subcontract packages modeled for cash before they are signed
• Headcount plans tied to collections rather than to the pitch deck
• Texas lien notice deadlines built into the monthly billing process
• Labor-burden and utilization reporting by job to price the hiring squeeze
• Lump-sum versus separated contract treatment captured for the CPA
• Speculative-space exposure and public-work backlog reported separately to the bank
• Competition for accountants answered with a documented, transferable process