Fractional CFO & Controller Services for Columbus Businesses

Columbus contractors and service companies are not short of work. They are short of the working capital, the reporting, and the people to manage a backlog that doubled in three years. A mechanical contractor in Hilliard that wins a data-center package has just taken on 90 days of labor and material ahead of the first pay application, a general contractor that reviews every invoice line, and a retainage balance that will not be released until commissioning. The bookkeeper who was fine at $5 million is closing the books seven weeks late. The WIP schedule is a spreadsheet the estimator updates when the surety asks.

The symptoms repeat across the metro. Receivables age past 60 days while the line covers payroll. Job margins that looked fine at bid vanish at closeout because change orders were performed and never billed. A lender wants a covenant certificate and a borrowing base and receives neither. The controller resigned for a job at a hospital system in March, and the search is still open. Meanwhile the owner is bidding the next package on a data-center campus because everyone else is, without knowing whether the last one made money.

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 a full-time hire when the company can support one. That sequence is how a $6 million contractor in Grove City 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 Central Ohio that means electrical, mechanical, and plumbing contractors working the New Albany and Licking County campuses, general contractors in Dublin and Westerville building the multifamily and logistics projects that follow the population, site and utility contractors along the Route 161 and I-70 corridors, building-materials yards and distributors that supply all of them, home-services companies in the growing suburbs from Delaware to Pickerington, and the professional-services and logistics firms that serve a metro adding residents faster than most of the Midwest.

The situations repeat. The owner still signs every check and reads cash from the bank app. The company doubled since 2023 and the close, the billing, and the collections did not. A surety has capped the program because the financial statements are on cash basis. A data-center general contractor requires a subcontractor with monthly financials, a documented safety program, and a real accounting system, and the company has one of the three. A partner buyout is 12 months out. Or cash is short in a company that is profitable on paper, because the profit is in retainage.

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 we stay in our lane. And if your plan is to hire a full-time CFO to fix books that a good controller could fix in a quarter, we will say so 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 Columbus that judgment goes to the questions the campuses force on every contractor. Can a $10 million electrical contractor fund the mobilization on a $5 million data-center package before the first draw, and what does that do to the line? What happens to the forecast if the semiconductor-related work slides another year, as it already has twice? Where does the company sit relative to Ohio's commercial activity tax, which applies at 0.26 percent to taxable gross receipts above a $6 million exclusion for 2025 and 2026, and what happens when revenue crosses the line?

We do not decide the tax position. We put it in the forecast and get your CPA in the room before the first invoice goes out. The working tools are a 13-week cash forecast updated every Monday, a monthly package with margin by job and by customer, a lender relationship that is managed rather than endured, and a bid discipline that checks the balance sheet before the estimate goes out. The national overview of our fractional CFO service covers the full scope. This page is about how it works between Marysville and Newark.

Fractional CFO engagements start at $3,500 per month. CFO Advisory starts at $5,000, Operating CFO at $8,500, 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. Travel to Columbus is scoped in the engagement letter, and one-time cleanup and software 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, and the percentage-of-completion adjustments that turn a cash-basis guess into a real margin. For a distributor it means inventory that ties to the count and a borrowing base the bank can audit.

In Columbus the hard part is not the work. It is finding someone who can do it when the hospital systems, the insurers, the university, and the large contractors all hire from the same pool of construction and cost 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 close calendar and a process rather than a mystery. We work in QuickBooks, Sage 300 CRE, ServiceTitan, JD Edwards, and Power BI, which covers most of what is installed between Grove City and Delaware.

Controller engagements start at $2,500 per month. The scope is written 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.

Ohio has no state general contractor license. The Ohio Construction Industry Licensing Board licenses electrical, HVAC, plumbing, hydronics, and refrigeration contractors for commercial work, and general contracting is regulated city by city, which in Central Ohio means a different registration in Columbus, Dublin, Delaware, and Newark. None of that sets your bonding capacity. A surety does, on the strength of a WIP schedule that reconciles, gross margins by job that hold from bid to closeout, working capital that is real, and an owner who can explain the numbers. On the campuses, the general contractors also want monthly financials from their subs. We build that package and keep it current.

Ohio's lien statute runs on a 21-day clock. A subcontractor or supplier on a commercial project generally must serve a notice of furnishing within 21 days of first providing labor or materials, or within 21 days of the owner's notice of commencement, to preserve full lien rights. The lien affidavit itself is due within 75 days of last furnishing on commercial work and 60 days on residential. On a data-center project with a dozen tiers and a general contractor that files a notice of commencement before the fence goes up, the 21 days can pass before the first invoice is drafted. We put the notice in the job setup and track the affidavit deadline on every aging report. Whether to file is your attorney's call.

The commercial activity tax is the other Ohio line that surprises growing contractors. It is measured on gross receipts, not profit, and a contractor that crosses the $6 million exclusion mid-year owes tax on the receipts above it whether or not the jobs were profitable. We keep the schedule, forecast the crossing, and make sure the ledger captures what the CPA needs to file. We do not give tax advice. We make sure it is in the bid.

Trouble in Columbus arrives from success. A contractor takes two campus packages at once, funds both mobilizations from the line, and discovers in month four that the general contractor's pay-application review takes 45 days and the retainage is 10 percent. The line is fully drawn. Payroll taxes slip a quarter. A supplier moves the account 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 payroll from a home equity line for five months and calling it a bridge.

We start with a 13-week cash-flow forecast built from actual receivables, actual payables, and actual payroll. 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 other Columbus turnaround is the schedule slip. A company that hired and bought equipment for semiconductor-related work now expected to complete in 2030 has a cost structure built for a 2027 timeline, and every month of delay is a month of overhead without the revenue. That company needs a realistic backlog by expected start date, an honest conversation about which crews and which equipment it can carry, and a cash forecast with a scenario in which the next date slips too. One of these companies is going to discover that the data-center work was carrying the semiconductor bet, and it is better to see that in a spreadsheet.

Concentration is the first challenge. Central Ohio's construction boom is unusually dependent on a handful of owners: five hyperscale operators, one chipmaker, and the developers building around them. A contractor with 70 percent of its backlog on those campuses has a strong year ahead and a fragile balance sheet, because a single owner's capital decision, a utility tariff dispute, or a zoning fight in Licking County can pause a project after mobilization. We report backlog by owner and by campus, run the forecast with a scenario in which the largest one pauses, and size the overhead to survive the scenario.

The second challenge is the tiering. On a hyperscale project a specialty sub can sit three or four levels below the owner, with pay-when-paid terms, retainage, and an approval chain that runs through a construction manager, a general contractor, and an owner's representative. The margin is real. The cash arrives months after the labor was paid. We model days-to-cash by project, build the notice-of-furnishing calendar into billing, and size the line to the gap rather than hoping the general contractor pays early. They rarely do.

The third challenge is growth itself. Columbus is adding residents and jobs faster than most of the Midwest, which pulls construction, cost, and finance talent toward the largest employers and leaves a $10 million contractor competing for accountants with a hospital system. It also drives up the cost of yard space, housing for crews, and the subcontractors you rely on. The answer is not to stop growing. It is to grow with a documented process, a weekly cash forecast, and a margin report that tells you which work is worth the working capital.

• Backlog concentration by owner and campus measured and stress-tested in the forecast
• Multi-tier payment chains, retainage, and pay-when-paid terms modeled as days-to-cash by project
• Notice of furnishing at 21 days and lien affidavits at 75 or 60 days tracked from job setup
• Commercial activity tax exposure forecast against the $6 million exclusion with the CPA
• Surety and general-contractor prequalification supported by monthly financials and a reconciled WIP
• Semiconductor timeline slip scenarios built into staffing and equipment decisions
• Competition for construction accounting talent answered with a documented, transferable process