Fractional CFO & Controller Services for Charleston Businesses

Charleston companies rarely fail from lack of work. They fail from the distance between the work and the accounting. A $7 million mechanical contractor in Summerville wins a $5 million package on the aircraft plant and a $3 million package on a Mount Pleasant medical office in the same season, and doubles its working capital need before the first pay application. Nobody told the bank. The bookkeeper who was fine at $7 million is closing the books seven weeks late, the WIP schedule is a spreadsheet the surety stopped trusting, and the owner reads cash from the bank app in traffic on I-526.

The symptoms have a Lowcountry accent. Receivables age past 60 days while the line covers payroll. The 90-day window to file a statement of account under South Carolina's lien statute closes while everyone waits on the construction manager's next draw. Change orders on the medical office were performed and never billed. The residential builder license renewal and the commercial contractor license renewal fall on different calendars, and both wanted financial statements that were not ready. Meanwhile every construction accountant in the tri-county area has an offer from an aerospace or automotive employer, and the offer includes a pension and a parking spot.

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 a $7 million contractor becomes a $20 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 Charleston that means general contractors in North Charleston and Summerville, mechanical and HVAC contractors running fleets out of Hanahan and Ladson, electrical contractors and plumbing contractors on the aerospace, automotive, and medical work, site-work and utility companies on the Berkeley and Dorchester County subdivisions, homebuilders and developers on Johns Island and Daniel Island, and the building-materials yards and distributors that supply them. We also work with port logistics companies, hospitality groups downtown, home-services companies, and professional-services firms. The list looks different in Greenville, where the automaker sets the calendar, and in Charlotte, but the finance questions repeat.

The situations repeat. The owner still approves every check and reads cash from the bank balance. The controller left for an aircraft or auto plant and the replacement was a bookkeeper with a better title. 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 on plant work 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 after a slow storm season, 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 Charleston CPA and attorney and we stay in our lane. 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, and you can spend the salary on a second estimator.

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 Charleston 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 a single owner can be the largest customer for half the trades in the county.

Charleston lenders have financed a building boom and a hurricane or two and they read WIP schedules carefully. A contractor pricing aerospace, automotive, or battery-plant work needs to know, before signing, whether it can fund 90 days of labor and material ahead of a first pay application, and what retainage does to the answer. A homebuilder on Johns Island needs a land and infrastructure pro forma that includes flood-zone cost. A hospitality group needs a line that peaks in March and rests in January. 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 Charleston 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 South Carolina contractor that includes retainage tracking, change-order billing, percentage-of-completion adjustments, and the notice-of-furnishing and statement-of-account calendar that protects the receivable in the first place.

In Charleston the hard part is not the work. It is keeping someone who can do it in a region where the labor force has grown three times faster than the national average. The aerospace and automotive plants, the port, the health systems, and the military hire from the same pool, and a $10 million sub cannot outbid a federal or manufacturing benefits package 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 Moncks Corner and Johns Island.

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.

South Carolina licenses contractors through two boards under the Department of Labor, Licensing and Regulation. The Contractor's Licensing Board covers general and mechanical work, and since a 2023 change the license is required when the total cost of a commercial job exceeds $10,000, up from $5,000. The Residential Builders Commission covers residential work above $5,000 and requires a surety bond of at least $15,000. License groups and limits rest on financial statements you submit, which makes the quality of your balance sheet the ceiling on the jobs you can pursue. We build the package the boards, the surety, and the bank want to see, and we keep it current so a renewal does not hold up a bid.

South Carolina's lien statute rewards contractors who keep a calendar. Every claimant must serve the owner and record a statement of account within 90 days after last furnishing labor or materials, and enforce within six months. Subcontractors and suppliers generally protect the full value of their claim by serving a notice of furnishing when a notice of project commencement has been filed, and without it their recovery may be limited to what the owner still owes the general contractor. We do not give legal advice. We do put the dates into the billing process so your attorney gets a call on day 60 rather than day 100.

On aerospace, automotive, battery-plant, and port 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 Charleston usually arrives with the weather. A named storm shuts the region for a week in September, the jobs restart late, the pay applications slip a cycle, and the line of credit that was fully drawn in August stays that way into November. 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 since Labor Day 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 strong at the top and uneven underneath. Construction employment grew 7.7 percent over the year on plant, port, and infrastructure work, while new private starts slowed on financing costs and the peninsula's largest redevelopment sites moved toward new owners. A concrete sub on the aircraft plant is turning down bids while a framing contractor tied to speculative apartments is chasing them. Both need 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 them is about to discover that its best customer was never profitable, and a spreadsheet is the cheapest place to find out.

Hurricane season is a line item. From June through November, every outdoor trade in the Lowcountry carries the risk of a lost week, a damaged jobsite, and a pay application that slips a cycle, and the tidal flooding on the peninsula does not wait for a named storm. A bid priced in February does not survive September unless someone priced the weather. We build a storm reserve and a seasonal productivity curve into the forecast, check the builder's risk and business-interruption coverage against the actual backlog, and make sure the cash plan can absorb a lost week without a call to the bank.

Growth financing is the second challenge. A company doubling revenue on plant and port work needs working capital it has not earned yet, and Charleston 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. The same lenders are watching labor cost, because a region adding 40 residents a day still cannot fill a job trailer, and wage pressure shows up in the bid two quarters before it shows up in the ledger.

Concentration is the third. A single aircraft maker, a single automaker, a single battery-materials campus, the port, and the military set the payment terms for a large share of the metro's subcontractors and suppliers. A $15 million company with half its backlog under one plant program is a healthy business until the program pauses, and the bank knows it. We build concentration into the forecast, size the line to the real exposure, and push for a second and third anchor customer before the first one asks for a price cut. Charleston companies that grew on one plant tend to learn this the year the plant changes its rate.

• Hurricane and tidal-flood weeks reserved for in the cash forecast and checked against insurance
• South Carolina's 90-day statement-of-account deadline and notice of furnishing built into billing
• Contractor's Licensing Board and Residential Builders Commission financial packages kept current
• Growth financing sized to the working capital a plant package actually requires
• Concentration in aerospace, automotive, battery, and port programs modeled in the forecast
• Labor cost pressure from a fast-growing region priced into bids two quarters early
• Competition with manufacturers and the military for accounting talent answered with a documented process