Fractional CFO & Controller Services for Boston Businesses

Boston companies rarely fail because nobody wants their work. They fail because the region's costs arrive on a weekly schedule and its revenue arrives on a quarterly one. A $9 million mechanical contractor in Woburn carries some of the highest labor rates in the country, a lease it signed when rents were rising, and a customer base of developers, universities, and hospital systems that pay on approval chains. Win one large lab or institutional package and the working-capital need doubles before the first draw. Nobody told the bank, and the bookkeeper who was fine at $4 million is now closing the books six weeks late.

The symptoms are consistent. Receivables age past 60 days while the line of credit covers payroll. Change orders are performed, discussed, and never billed. Retainage receivable becomes a number nobody says out loud. The owner cannot say what last month earned because the job-cost ledger and the general ledger disagree by an amount that grows every quarter. And the controller the company finally hired in 2023 has left for a biotech that offered equity and a shorter commute.

The fix is a sequence, not a heroic month. 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 $6 million Greater Boston subcontractor becomes a $20 million one without the accounting department becoming the reason it stalls.

Our clients are privately held companies with roughly $3 million to $50 million in revenue, run by the people who own them. In Greater Boston that means general contractors in Quincy and Braintree, HVAC contractors and plumbing contractors serving the Route 128 and Interstate 495 belts, electrical contractors on lab, hospital, and university work in Cambridge and the Longwood area, remodelers and specialty subs working the older housing stock from Newton to Peabody, and the building-materials yards and distributors that supply all of them. We also work with home-services companies, professional-services firms, and the growth businesses the region produces in quantity.

The situations repeat. Revenue doubled in three years and the close, the billing, and the collections did not. The bank wants a covenant certificate and a WIP schedule, and both are late. A surety has capped the bonding program until the financials are credible. A founder is raising a round or selling a stake and has discovered that the books would not survive diligence. A lab-focused contractor is watching its pipeline dry up and needs to know which of its other customers are actually profitable. Or cash is short, the vendors are calling, and the owner needs a plan rather than reassurance.

If what you need is bookkeeping alone, tax preparation, an audit opinion, or legal advice, hire someone else and we will help you find them. We coordinate with those people and stay in our lane. And if the 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 puts a chief financial officer's judgment on your side for part of the week and a fraction of the salary. 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 between Lowell and Brockton.

Boston lenders are careful and they have long memories. A contractor deciding whether to take a package on the Suffolk Downs buildout, a hospital expansion, or a public school project needs to know before signing whether it can fund the labor and material ahead of a first pay application, what the retainage will do to year-end working capital, and whether the line of credit will stretch. A growth company deciding between a bank line and an equity raise needs the same model with a different set of outputs. Those are CFO questions. We answer them with a forecast, a bank conversation, and a decision, usually within the week.

A Fractional CFO engagement starts at $3,500 per month, and an Operating CFO who runs the finance function day to day starts at $8,500. CFO Advisory begins at $5,000, Embedded CFO at $12,500, and interim leadership is priced to the situation. Treat those as starting points rather than quotes. The final number reflects company size, entity count, transaction volume, the state of the books, urgency, and what your lender and surety are asking to see. One-time cleanup, software, and travel are separate unless the scope says otherwise.

A controller exists 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, certified payroll support on public and prevailing-wage work, and the percentage-of-completion adjustments that turn a cash-basis guess into a real margin.

In Boston the hard part is not the work. It is finding someone who can do it at a price a $10 million company can pay. Hospitals, universities, biotech, and the large engineering firms all hire from the same pool of accountants, and the metro's average wage runs roughly 28 percent above the national figure. 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 Framingham and the harbor.

A controller engagement starts at $2,500 per month. We write the scope down on day one and publish the close calendar, so the deliverables do not change from month to 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.

Massachusetts regulates construction through two separate credentials that owners routinely confuse. A Construction Supervisor License is required to supervise construction of one- and two-family homes and buildings up to 35,000 cubic feet, and it belongs to a person, not the company. Home Improvement Contractor registration applies to residential work on existing owner-occupied one- to four-unit homes at $1,000 or more, and it comes with a Guaranty Fund that pays consumer claims up to $10,000. Electrical and plumbing licenses run through their own boards. We keep the credential calendar inside the finance function, because a lapsed registration stops a permit, a stopped permit stops a draw, and a stopped draw is a cash event.

Two Massachusetts laws shape a contractor's cash cycle more than any bid. The Prompt Pay Act, on private projects of $3 million or more, caps the pay-application cycle at 30 days, requires approval or rejection within 15 days, and voids pay-if-paid clauses. That is a gift, but only to contractors who bill in the required form. The mechanics lien statute runs on its own calendar: a subcontractor's Notice of Contract is due by the earliest of 60 days after a Notice of Substantial Completion, 90 days after a Notice of Termination, or 90 days after last furnishing. We do not give legal advice. We put those dates on the billing calendar so your attorney is consulted before a deadline, not after.

Bonding capacity here rests on 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 without a translator. 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 Boston tends to arrive in a predictable order. The line of credit is fully drawn in March and never comes back down. A lab developer pauses a project and the sub's backlog drops by a third in a week. Payroll taxes slip a quarter. A supplier in Braintree 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 loan. None of that is fatal if someone takes control of cash in the next two weeks.

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

The current cycle is uneven here in a particular way. About 20 million square feet of Massachusetts lab space sat vacant going into 2026, and nearly 90 percent of the 2.8 million square feet still under construction was already committed, so the speculative lab work that fed a generation of subcontractors is not coming back soon. Meanwhile Suffolk Downs, hospital campuses, and public infrastructure keep the trades employed. A contractor that grew on lab fit-outs needs a real margin by job and a forecast that goes past next Friday to resize toward the work that exists. One of them is about to learn its biggest customer was never its most profitable one, and it is cheaper to learn that in a spreadsheet.

Winter is a working-capital line in Boston, and it runs from December into April. Site work, paving, roofing, and exterior trades lose days to cold, nor'easters, and short daylight, while the fixed costs keep running. Crews are kept on so they are still there in spring, equipment sits, and the April pay application carries February's overhead. The right structure is a cash forecast that prices the slow quarter before it arrives, a seasonal line sized to the trough rather than the average, and a service base that bills through the cold. A bid made in July should carry a winter productivity assumption, and most do not.

Institutional and developer work brings its own cash pattern. Universities, hospital systems, and life-science landlords prequalify vendors, badge crews, hold retainage, and pay on approval chains that run through owner's representatives and lenders. A $3 million package on a campus project can require four months of financing before the first dollar arrives, and Prompt Pay protections only help the contractor whose billing is clean enough to invoke them. We model the cycle before the bid, size the line to it, and put the notice deadlines on the same calendar as the billing dates.

Cost is the quiet challenge. Massachusetts ranked fifth nationally for domestic out-migration in 2024, and the reasons named were housing, taxes, and health care, which are also the reasons a $12 million company in Newton struggles to hire a second estimator. The answer is not a wage freeze. It is a labor-burden model that prices every hour honestly, pricing that passes cost through instead of absorbing it, and a monthly package that shows which customers and which crews earn the margin. The City Council's September 2026 proposal to bar new data centers by zoning is a reminder that the next wave of construction here will be decided at hearings, and a contractor should not finance a backlog that has not cleared one.

• Winter productivity loss and fixed overhead priced into bids and the cash forecast
• CSL, HIC, and trade-license renewals tracked inside the finance calendar
• Prompt Pay billing cycles and Massachusetts lien notice deadlines built into the billing process
• Institutional, hospital, and developer project cash cycles financed before the bid
• High regional labor cost answered with a burden model and pass-through pricing
• Lab-market exposure measured by customer and resized toward profitable work
• Competition for accounting talent answered with a documented, transferable process