Fractional CFO & Controller Services for Dallas-Fort Worth Businesses

A Metroplex contractor rarely runs short of opportunity. It runs short of the working capital and the reporting that opportunity requires. An electrical contractor in Lewisville doing $8 million a year wins a $5 million package on a data-center campus and discovers that the general contractor pays on a 60-day cycle and the owner's lender wants a WIP schedule before it releases the next draw. The bookkeeper who was adequate at $4 million is now closing the month five weeks late.

The pattern is consistent across the region. Receivables stretch while the line of credit carries payroll. Change orders are performed in Plano and never billed from the office in Irving. The bank asks for covenant compliance and gets a spreadsheet with three tabs named Final. Meanwhile, every construction accountant worth hiring has an offer from a homebuilder or a data-center developer, and a $12 million subcontractor cannot match the signing bonus.

The fix is a sequence, not a hire. 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. That is how a $5 million company in Denton becomes a $20 million company 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 Dallas-Fort Worth that means general contractors working the corporate relocations in Frisco and Plano, HVAC contractors and plumbing contractors running fleets out of Garland and Mansfield, electrical contractors on the data-center pads in Red Oak and along Interstate 35W north of Fort Worth, homebuilders and land developers in Collin and Denton counties, and the building-materials yards and distributors that supply all of them. We also serve home-services companies and professional-services firms.

The situations repeat. The owner approves every check and has no idea what next month looks like. The controller left for a public company in Las Colinas. The bank wants monthly reporting and a WIP schedule, and both are late. A surety has capped the bonding program because nobody could explain the under-billings. Revenue doubled in two years and the close did not keep up. A sale, a partner buyout, or an acquisition is coming and the books would not survive diligence.

You should hire someone else if you need bookkeeping alone, tax preparation, an audit opinion, or legal advice. We work alongside 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 managed bank relationship, bid decisions made with job-margin data, and a monthly package that says where the money went. The national fractional CFO page covers the full scope. This page is about how it works between Fort Worth and McKinney.

Metroplex lenders have been through more than one building cycle, and they read WIP schedules closely. A contractor bidding on data-center or industrial work along the southern corridor needs to know, before signing, whether it can fund 90 days of labor and material ahead of a first payment. A homebuilder in Celina needs a lot-takedown schedule that matches the sales pace. 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, and urgency. One-time cleanup, software, and travel to Texas 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 Texas surety 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 the Metroplex the hard part is not the work. It is keeping the person who does it. The corporate headquarters that moved to Plano and Frisco hire accountants by the hundred, and the public homebuilders hire from the same pool. 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.

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.

Texas does not issue a statewide general contractor license. The trades are another matter. Air conditioning and refrigeration contractors and electrical contractors are licensed through the Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation, plumbing contractors through the Texas State Board of Plumbing Examiners, and Metroplex cities layer their own permitting on top. What replaces the license as a gate on growth is the surety. Bonding capacity rests on a credible WIP schedule, consistent gross margin by job, working capital that does not evaporate at year end, and an owner who can explain the numbers. We build that package and keep it current.

Texas lien law is a calendar, and the calendar changed. For original contracts signed on or after January 1, 2022, a subcontractor on a nonresidential project preserves its rights by sending notice to the owner and the original contractor by the 15th day of the third month after each month it furnished labor or materials; on residential work it is the 15th day of the second month. Miss the date and the money you are owed becomes a conversation instead of a claim. We build the notice calendar into the billing process, and your construction attorney reviews the rest.

Texas sales tax on construction turns on how the contract is written. A lump-sum contract makes the contractor the consumer of materials and taxable on its purchases; a separated contract makes the contractor a retailer of the incorporated materials and requires collecting tax from the customer, while nonresidential repair and remodeling is taxable regardless. We do not give tax advice. We make sure job setup, contract form, and the ledger capture what your CPA needs, and we get the CPA in the room before the first invoice goes out.

Trouble in the Metroplex tends to arrive in the same order. The line of credit is fully drawn by spring and stays there. Payroll taxes slip a quarter. A supplier in Grand Prairie moves you to COD. The surety asks for an updated WIP schedule and goes quiet after reading it. By the time the bank calls, 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 Texas 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 new. Our turnaround CFO and 13-week cash-flow forecast pages cover the mechanics.

The current cycle is uneven. Data-center and industrial work is running hot in the southern corridor while the region's overall growth cooled to 1.4 percent, down from 2.3 percent the year before, and Dallas County itself lost roughly 2,600 residents. A framing contractor tied to entry-level housing and an electrical sub turning down work in Red Oak 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 data-center wave has rewritten the rules for subcontractors. A campus like the one DataBank is building in Red Oak, financed with roughly $2 billion in construction debt, runs on tier-one general contractors and payment terms written for companies far larger than a $10 million electrical sub. A sub that takes a package sized at half its annual revenue has just doubled its working-capital need. We model the cash curve of the job before you sign, size the credit line to it, and put the retainage and notice deadlines on a calendar.

Weather in North Texas is a cash event, not a footnote. A hard freeze stops concrete and drives HVAC contractors and plumbing contractors into weeks of emergency work that arrives all at once and then vanishes. Summer heat compresses productive hours on roofs and slabs. A forecast that assumes the same crew hours every month is wrong twice a year. We build seasonal labor and equipment curves into the plan so the January spike and the August squeeze are financed instead of discovered.

Growth itself is the third challenge. The northern suburbs are absorbing corporate relocations, and the companies that serve them are scaling faster than their reporting. A company that triples in two years needs credit, controls, and a close it has not earned yet, and a lender will finance that growth only when the reporting proves it is profitable. Somewhere in Collin County an owner is about to learn that his largest customer, the one everyone is proud of, has never made him a dollar. Better to find out in a spreadsheet than in a bank meeting.

• Data-center and industrial subcontract packages modeled for cash before they are signed
• Texas lien notice deadlines built into the monthly billing process
• Lump-sum versus separated contract treatment captured in job setup for the CPA
• Freeze-season and heat-season labor curves priced into forecasts
• Surety and bank packages built on a credible WIP schedule and real working capital
• Growth financing sized to the working capital a larger backlog actually requires
• Competition for construction accountants answered with a documented, transferable process