Fractional CFO & Controller Services for Birmingham Businesses

Birmingham contractors rarely lack for work. They lack for working capital and for someone who knows how much they need. A mechanical sub in Pelham that has done $8 million a year for a decade wins a $6 million package on a hospital tower and a $4 million package on a data-center shell in the same quarter. The company just doubled its need for cash, and the bank found out when the line hit its ceiling. The bookkeeper, who was fine at $8 million, is closing the books seven weeks late, the WIP schedule is a spreadsheet the surety stopped trusting, and the owner is reading margin from gut feel.

The symptoms wear Alabama clothes. Receivables age past 60 days while the line covers payroll. Change orders on the hospital job were performed, argued about, and never billed. The four-month lien window for subcontractors and suppliers closes while everyone waits for the general contractor's next draw. The Home Builders Licensure Board renewal and the general contractors board renewal fall on different calendars, and both require financial statements that were not ready. Meanwhile every experienced construction accountant in Jefferson County has an offer from a health system or a bank, and the second offer usually wins.

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. It is how an $8 million sub becomes a $20 million sub 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 Birmingham that means general contractors headquartered in Hoover and Homewood, mechanical and HVAC contractors running fleets out of Bessemer and Fultondale, electrical contractors and plumbing contractors serving the medical district and the industrial corridors along I-20 and I-65, site-work and paving companies chasing the Shelby County subdivisions, and the steel fabricators, pipe suppliers, and building-materials yards that feed all of them. We also work with home-services companies, professional-services firms, and the specialty subs suddenly pricing data-center work for the first time.

The situations repeat. The owner still signs 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 the surety wants a WIP schedule, and both arrive late and disagree with each other. Bonding capacity is capped until the financials are credible. Revenue doubled and the close, the billing, and the collections did not. A sale, a family transition, 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 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 your Birmingham CPA and attorney and we stay in our lane. If your plan is to hire a full-time CFO at a salary the company cannot yet support 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 Birmingham that means a 13-week cash forecast updated every Monday, a bank relationship that is managed rather than endured, 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 a market where the bank down the street is also a national lender with a credit committee.

Birmingham lenders have read a lot of contractor financial statements and they read WIP schedules with a pencil. A contractor bidding data-center or hospital work needs to know, before signing, whether it can fund three months of labor and material ahead of a first pay application, and what retainage does to the answer. Equipment finance for a paving fleet that works nine months a year needs a replacement schedule rather than a reaction. A supplier financing inventory for a foundry expansion needs terms that match the customer's draw cycle. 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 to Alabama 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, percentage-of-completion adjustments, and the sales-and-use tax records on materials that your CPA needs to file correctly in Alabama.

In Birmingham the hard part is not the work. It is keeping someone who can do it. Banks, health systems, and the large general contractors headquartered here all hire from the same pool of construction accountants, and a $12 million sub 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 Gardendale and Alabaster.

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.

Alabama licenses general contractors through the Licensing Board for General Contractors, and since October 1, 2024, the threshold for commercial and industrial work is a project cost of $100,000 or more, up from $50,000. Subcontractors need their own license when their portion reaches $50,000. Residential work runs through the Home Builders Licensure Board on a separate calendar. License classification and bid limits rest on the financial statements you submit, which means the quality of your balance sheet sets the ceiling on the jobs you can pursue. We build the financial package the board, the surety, and the bank want to see, and we keep it current so a renewal does not hold up a bid.

Alabama's lien statute rewards contractors who keep a calendar. Original contractors generally have six months after last furnishing to file, subcontractors and suppliers four months, and laborers 30 days. Subcontractors and suppliers typically hold an unpaid-balance lien, limited to what the owner still owes the general contractor, unless a supplier gave notice before furnishing. The practical lesson is that a sub's lien rights are only as good as the timing of its notice. We do not give legal advice. We do put the dates into the billing process so your attorney gets a call on day 90 rather than day 130.

On data-center, hospital, and foundry work, a specialty sub can sit three tiers below the owner, and the cash arrives months after the labor was paid. The principal has managed mechanic's liens, claims, and litigation support coordination for multi-entity contractors, and our construction CFO work builds the notice calendar into collections rather than treating it as a legal afterthought.

Trouble in Birmingham usually announces itself in the same order. The line of credit is fully drawn in March 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 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. Metro construction employment was down 1.6 percent over the year in July 2026 even as the state posted a record investment year and the largest projects moved toward groundbreaking. That gap is normal: announced capital shows up as poured concrete a year or two later, and the subs who staffed up for the announcement carry the payroll in between. A company caught in that gap needs 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 those companies is about to learn its best customer was never profitable, and a spreadsheet is the cheapest place to find out.

Heat and rain set the calendar. Central Alabama summers push crews to early starts and split shifts, and the afternoon thunderstorms that roll off the ridges wash out pour schedules and paving windows without warning. A site-work or roofing bid priced in February does not survive August unless someone priced the weather. We build seasonal labor and equipment curves into the forecast so the summer margin squeeze is planned rather than discovered. HVAC contractors and home-services companies live the mirror image, with cash arriving in a summer wave and a thin winter, and the right answer is a maintenance-agreement base, a supplier line sized to the pre-season buy, and a forecast that reaches from October to April.

Alabama treats contractors as the consumer of the materials they install, which means sales and use tax is generally paid on purchases rather than charged on the contract, and the records have to prove it. Getting that wrong on a large job is expensive in both directions. Add the state's separate residential and commercial licensing boards, county and municipal business licenses in Jefferson and Shelby counties, and Alabama's business privilege tax, and a growing contractor carries a compliance calendar that nobody owns until the CFO does. We do not decide the tax position. We make sure the ledger captures what your CPA needs to file it.

Growth financing is the third challenge. A company doubling revenue on the strength of medical-district and data-center work needs working capital it has not earned yet, and Birmingham lenders will finance growth only when the reporting proves it is profitable growth. That means a WIP schedule that reconciles, gross margin by job that holds up under questions, and an owner who can explain both. Most of what we do in the first 90 days is make that conversation possible.

• Alabama's $100,000 general contractor and $50,000 subcontractor licensing thresholds tracked against job pipeline
• Four-month subcontractor lien clocks and unpaid-balance notice built into billing
• Summer heat and storm delays priced into bids and seasonal forecasts
• Contractor sales and use tax records maintained for the CPA
• Surety and board financial packages kept current so renewals do not hold up bids
• Growth financing sized to the working capital a hospital or data-center package actually requires
• Competition for construction accounting talent answered with a documented, transferable process