Fractional CFO & Controller Services for Charlotte Businesses

North Carolina makes growth a financial event before it is an operational one. A general contractor with a limited license can take projects up to $750,000 each. The first $1.2 million job that walks in the door requires an intermediate license, and the Licensing Board wants to see $75,000 of working capital on an audited financial statement or an agreed-upon procedures report from a CPA. A Matthews contractor whose books live in a QuickBooks file with a six-week-old bank reconciliation cannot pass that test, and the job goes to someone who can.

The rest of the pattern is familiar. Receivables from a general contractor stretch to 60 days while payroll leaves every Friday. Change orders get performed in Huntersville and never billed from the office in Pineville. The bank asks for a covenant certificate and receives a spreadsheet with three tabs named Final. And every construction accountant in the region who is any good has a standing offer from a bank in Uptown, at a salary a $9 million subcontractor cannot match without hurting itself.

The fix is a sequence, not a hire. Assess what is actually true about cash, margin, and debt. Clean up the ledger until the numbers can be believed by a lender and a licensing board. Stabilize the weekly cash cycle and the monthly close. Document the process so it survives without us. Then transition it to your team. That is how a $4 million company in Gastonia becomes a $15 million company with an unlimited license instead of a $4 million company with a story.

Our clients are privately held companies between roughly $3 million and $50 million in revenue, owned by the people who run them. In the Charlotte region that means general contractors working the infill in South End and University City, HVAC contractors and plumbing contractors running fleets out of Gastonia and Monroe, electrical contractors on the industrial parks in Concord and Kannapolis and the data-center pads west of the airport, homebuilders and site developers in Union and Iredell counties, and the building-materials yards that supply all of them. We also serve home-services companies and professional-services firms that sell to the banks.

The situations repeat. The owner approves every check and has no forecast past next Friday. The controller left for a fintech in Ballantyne. The bank wants monthly reporting and a WIP schedule, and both are late. A surety has frozen the bonding program because nobody could explain the under-billings. Revenue doubled in two years and the close did not keep up. Or the company has crossed the state line into Fort Mill and nobody has sorted out what South Carolina now expects.

You should hire someone else if you need bookkeeping alone, tax preparation, an audit opinion, or legal advice. We work beside the people who do those things and hand them cleaner books. If your plan is to hire a full-time CFO and hope the ledger cleans itself, 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 rather than endured, bid and pricing decisions made from job-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 Mooresville and Rock Hill.

Charlotte is a banking town, and it shows in how lenders read a borrower. The credit officer across the table knows what a real WIP schedule looks like, which is an advantage if your reporting is credible and a problem if it is not. An electrical contractor considering a data-center package sized at half its annual revenue needs to know, before signing, whether it can fund 90 days of labor and material ahead of the first payment, and whether the license limit and the bond line will stretch. Those are CFO questions. We answer them with a model, a bank conversation, and a decision, usually inside 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 North Carolina 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 ledger that ties to the general ledger, produces a WIP schedule a surety and the Licensing Board can read, runs receivables and payables on a calendar, and reconciles every bank, loan, and credit-card account monthly. For a contractor that includes retainage tracking, change-order billing, and percentage-of-completion adjustments. For a distributor it includes inventory valuation and margin by line.

In Charlotte the hard part is not the work. It is keeping the person who does it. Two of the largest banks in the country run major operations here, and they hire accountants by the floor. A fractional controller solves that by running the function and documenting it, so the next hire inherits a close calendar and a written procedure instead of a mystery and a shared drive. We work in QuickBooks, Sage 300 CRE, ServiceTitan, JD Edwards, and Power BI, which covers most of what is installed between Cornelius and Indian Trail.

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, 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.

North Carolina ties a general contractor's license to its balance sheet. The North Carolina Licensing Board for General Contractors sets three tiers: limited, for projects up to $750,000, which requires $17,000 of working capital or $80,000 of net worth; intermediate, up to $1.5 million per project, which requires $75,000 of working capital; and unlimited, which requires $150,000. Intermediate and unlimited applicants prove it with an audited financial statement or a CPA's agreed-upon procedures report, or post a bond of $500,000 or $1 million instead. A construction CFO's first job here is to keep the year-end balance sheet clean enough to pass.

North Carolina's lien law runs on a short clock. On projects that require a lien agent, a subcontractor or supplier preserves its lien rights only if the lien agent receives a Notice to Lien Agent within 15 days of first furnishing labor or materials. Fifteen days, not 15 business days, and the notice has to arrive, not be mailed. We build the lien agent lookup and the notice into job setup so it happens the week the job opens, and your construction attorney handles anything that turns into a claim.

Sales tax on construction work in North Carolina turns on a distinction that trips up mechanical and electrical contractors especially. Since the state extended sales tax to repair, maintenance, and installation services, a transaction is presumed taxable unless the contractor substantiates that it is a real property contract for a capital improvement, typically with Form E-589CI from the customer. The same HVAC crew can perform a taxable repair on Monday and an exempt capital improvement on Tuesday. We do not give tax advice. We make sure the job type is set at the estimate and the affidavits are filed with the job.

Trouble in Charlotte tends to arrive in the same order. The line of credit is fully drawn by spring and never comes back down. Payroll taxes slip a quarter. A supply house in Concord moves you to COD. The surety asks for an updated WIP schedule and stops returning calls after reading it. By the time the bank asks for a meeting, 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 the banks here have workout groups that have seen everything and prefer borrowers who arrive 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.

The current cycle is uneven. Industrial net absorption fell 30 percent from the first quarter to the second quarter of 2026 even as rents rose 6.5 percent, and the construction pipeline that surged in 2024 has settled. A contractor who staffed up for the speculative warehouse wave along Interstate 85 and a data-center electrical sub turning down work need the same thing: a real margin by job, a cash forecast that goes past next Friday, and the discipline to stop taking work that loses money slowly.

The metro straddles a state line, and the line runs through your payroll. A plumbing contractor based in Pineville that follows its customers into Fort Mill and Rock Hill has a South Carolina contractor license question, a second state's withholding and unemployment accounts, and a second set of sales-tax rules on the same kind of job. Growth into York County is sensible. Discovering the compliance bill after the fact is not. We map the two-state footprint in the assessment, get your CPA and attorney to settle the registrations, and build the ledger so each state reports cleanly.

Public work is about to change shape. Mecklenburg County voters approved a one-cent transit sales tax in November 2025, taking the rate to 8.25 percent and projecting roughly $19.4 billion over 30 years, with 40 percent for roads and the rest for rail and bus. For a site contractor or an electrical sub, that is a decade of public work with certified payroll, retainage, and slow but reliable pay. It is also a penny more on every taxable purchase the company makes. Both belong in the forecast.

Weather here is milder than the coast, but it is not free. Summer thunderstorms cost a roofing or paving crew a day a week from June through August. The occasional ice storm shuts the region down for three days and sends HVAC contractors and plumbing contractors into a week of emergency calls that arrive all at once and then vanish. Remnants of tropical systems, as western North Carolina learned in 2024, can turn a normal September into a month of insurance work and material shortages. A forecast that assumes the same crew hours every month is wrong twice a year.

• Year-end working capital protected so the NCLBGC license tier survives the owner's distribution
• Notice to Lien Agent built into job setup to meet the 15-day receipt deadline
• Capital improvement versus repair, maintenance, and installation classification captured at the estimate for the CPA
• Two-state payroll, licensing, and sales-tax footprint for companies working in York County
• Data-center and industrial subcontract packages modeled for cash before they are signed
• Public transit and road work priced with certified payroll and retainage in the cash curve
• Competition for accounting talent from the banks answered with a documented, transferable process