Fractional CFO & Controller Services for Baltimore Businesses

Baltimore contractors rarely fail for lack of work. They fail from the distance between the work and the accounting. A $6 million electrical contractor in Glen Burnie that wins a $3 million package on a distribution center near the port has 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 between jobsites.

The symptoms are the same on both sides of the Beltway. 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 MHIC paperwork for a residential job is somewhere in a truck. And the controller who kept it all in her head has taken a job with a federal contractor in Columbia, where the parking is free and the deadlines are someone else's problem.

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. Assess, Clean up, Stabilize, Document, Transition. That is how a $4 million Baltimore contractor becomes a $15 million contractor 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 the Baltimore metro that means general contractors in Towson and Columbia, HVAC contractors and plumbing contractors running fleets out of Glen Burnie and Owings Mills, electrical contractors on the industrial and logistics work along the I-95 corridor and around the port, remodelers serving the county suburbs from Bel Air to Ellicott City, and the building-materials yards and distributors that supply all of them. We also work with home-services companies, professional-services firms, and the subcontractors who are learning what a federal or state prime's invoicing requirements look 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 stay in our lane. And if your plan is to hire a full-time CFO and hope the books fix themselves, 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 means a 13-week cash forecast updated every Monday, a bank relationship that is managed rather than endured, bid and pricing 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 from Westminster to Annapolis.

Baltimore lenders read WIP schedules carefully and they have long memories. A contractor deciding whether to bid on port-related work, a state transportation package, or a data-center fit-out in Howard County needs to know before signing whether it can fund 90 days of labor and material ahead of a first pay application, and what the retention will do to year-end working capital. Equipment finance for a fleet that slows in January needs a replacement schedule, not a reaction. 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 what the bank and surety are asking for. One-time cleanup, software, and travel 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 Maryland contractor that includes retention tracking, change-order billing, certified payroll support on state and federal work, and the percentage-of-completion adjustments that turn a cash-basis guess into a real margin.

In the Baltimore metro the hard part is not the work. It is finding someone who can do it and keeping them, when the federal contractors, the health systems, and the large engineering firms in the Washington corridor all hire from the same pool. A $10 million contractor in Catonsville 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 Bel Air and Annapolis.

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.

Maryland licenses residential work through the Home Improvement Commission. Only an MHIC-licensed contractor may contract with a homeowner for home improvement, and since the subcontractor license category was eliminated in 2016, subs may work under a licensed contractor's umbrella. Commercial general contracting is not licensed at the state level, while electrical, plumbing, and HVACR trades carry their own state boards, and the counties layer permits and registrations on top. That patchwork is a finance problem: a lapsed license can void a residential contract's enforceability and stop a permit, and a stopped permit stops a draw. We keep the credential calendar inside the finance function where someone will look at it.

Maryland's mechanic's lien law runs on two clocks that matter to cash. A subcontractor or supplier must serve a notice of intent to lien on the owner within 120 days of its last work, and on an owner-occupied single-family residence the notice must also arrive before the owner pays the general contractor in full. A petition to establish the lien must be filed within 180 days of last work. Miss either date and the receivable becomes a conversation instead of a claim. We do not give legal advice. We do put those dates on the billing calendar so your attorney is consulted before a deadline, not after.

Surety capacity in this market rests on financial statements the underwriter believes: a WIP schedule that reconciles, consistent gross margins by job, working capital that does not vanish at year end, and an owner who can explain the numbers. State and federal primes add prequalification, certified payroll, and invoicing formats of their own. Our principal has managed mechanic's liens, claims, and litigation support coordination for multi-entity contractors, and has built the lender and surety package that keeps the next bid from waiting on the last close. Our construction CFO page covers the mechanics.

Trouble in Baltimore announces itself in a familiar order. The line of credit is fully drawn in March and stays that way. Retention receivable grows into a number nobody wants to say out loud. Payroll taxes slip a quarter. A supplier in Glen Burnie moves you to COD. The surety asks for an updated WIP and goes quiet. By the time the bank calls, the owner has been funding payroll from savings for six 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 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 split. Construction employment in the metro rose 3.1 percent over the year to August 2026 while trade, transportation, and utilities fell 3.5 percent and government fell 1.7 percent. A sub tied to warehouse and port work is adding crews at the same time a company serving state agencies is watching its backlog thin. Both need the same thing: 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 them is about to discover its best customer was never profitable, and it is better to find out in a spreadsheet.

Winter is a cash line, and so is the shoulder season. Site work, paving, roofing, and exterior trades lose days from December through February, and Maryland's employment data showed the seasonal swing plainly in early 2026, with construction adding 2,400 jobs statewide in January and shedding 4,100 in February as the usual losses arrived late. Fixed costs do not pause for weather. The right structure is a cash forecast that prices the slow quarter in advance, a seasonal line sized to the trough, and a service base that bills through the cold.

Port and infrastructure work brings a particular cash pattern. Public owners and their primes pay on approval chains that run through engineers, inspectors, and lenders, hold retention to the end, and require certified payroll and prequalification on the way in. A $3 million package on a bridge, tunnel, or terminal project can require months of financing before the first meaningful draw. We model that before the bid, size the line to it, and put the lien notice dates on the same calendar as the billing dates. The alternative is discovering the financing need in month three, when the bank is least interested.

The metro's growth is uneven, and that shapes collections and pricing. The city has lost residents since 2020 while the surrounding counties have held or grown, and a remodeler or HVAC contractor serving Baltimore County rowhouses has a different receivables profile from one serving new subdivisions in Harford County. The two should not share a pricing model. We build the forecast by customer segment so the owner can see which half of the business is carrying the other, and for how long.

• Winter and shoulder-season productivity loss priced into bids and the cash forecast
• MHIC, trade-board, and county credentials tracked inside the finance calendar
• Maryland 120-day notice and 180-day petition deadlines built into billing
• Port, tunnel, and bridge subcontract cash cycles financed before the bid, not after
• Certified payroll and prequalification requirements built into job setup on public work
• Segment-level margin and receivables for companies serving both the city and the counties
• Competition for construction accounting talent answered with a documented, transferable process