Fractional CFO & Controller Services for Denver Businesses

Most of what a Front Range contractor earns arrives between April and November. The rent, the trucks, the office staff, the insurance, and the owner's draw arrive every month. A site contractor in Brighton that clears $900,000 of gross profit in the season and carries $70,000 of monthly overhead is profitable on paper and out of cash in February. Add a slow spring and a general contractor that pays in 60 days, and the credit line is at its ceiling before the first pour of the year.

The rest of the pattern is consistent across the metro. Change orders are performed in Parker and never billed from the office in Englewood. The WIP schedule is a spreadsheet the surety asked for once and nobody has opened since. The bank asks for a covenant certificate and receives a number the owner is fairly sure about. And every construction accountant along Interstate 25 who is any good has an offer from an engineering firm in the Tech Center at a salary a $10 million subcontractor cannot match.

The fix is a sequence, not a hire. Assess what is actually true about cash, margin, and debt, including what the winter really costs. Clean up the ledger until 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 Arvada becomes a $20 million company without the February cash call becoming an annual event.

Our clients are privately held companies between roughly $3 million and $50 million in revenue, owned by the people who run them. On the Front Range that means general contractors on the multifamily and tenant-improvement work from the Tech Center to Boulder, roofing and exteriors companies that live on the hail cycle, electrical contractors and HVAC contractors serving the airport submarket and the data-center and industrial buildings out toward Commerce City and Brighton, plumbing contractors following the production builders into Castle Rock, Parker, and Weld County, and the building-materials yards and distributors that supply all of them. We also serve engineering, architecture, and other professional-services firms and home-services companies.

The situations repeat. The owner approves every check and has no forecast past next Friday. The controller left for an engineering firm in Greenwood Village. The bank wants monthly reporting and a WIP schedule, and both are late. A surety has capped the bond line because the last WIP showed under-billings nobody could explain. A professional-services firm has tripled headcount and still bills on the 20th of the following month, and the partners wonder why the line of credit never goes to zero.

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 and extended to cover the winter, a bank relationship that is managed rather than endured, bid and pricing decisions made from job-margin or utilization 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 Boulder and Castle Rock.

Denver lenders have become careful about seasonality and concentration. A roofer whose best year was a hail year needs to show the bank what revenue looks like in a year the storms miss. An electrical contractor considering an airport-submarket 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. An engineering firm needs a utilization model before it hires the next 10 people. 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 Colorado 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 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 professional-services firm it includes work-in-process by project and a billing cycle that closes on the fifth instead of the twentieth.

In Denver the hard part is not the work. It is keeping the person who does it. The engineering firms, the energy companies, and the aerospace contractors along the Interstate 25 corridor hire accountants at scale, and they pay more than a $9 million contractor can. A fractional controller solves that by running the function and documenting it, so the next hire inherits a written procedure instead of a rumor. 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 or project 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.

Colorado has no statewide general contractor license. Electrical contractors and plumbing contractors are licensed by state boards under the Department of Regulatory Agencies, and general contractors are licensed city by city, so a company working in Denver, Aurora, Lakewood, and Douglas County holds four licenses with four renewal dates. What replaces the state license as the gate on growth is the surety, which decides on the quality of your WIP schedule, your gross margin by job, and your working capital at year end. We build that package and keep the municipal license calendar next to it.

Colorado's lien statute runs on months, not days, but it is unforgiving at the end. A subcontractor or supplier must serve a notice of intent to lien on the owner and the prime contractor at least 10 days before recording a lien statement, and the statement must be recorded within four months of the last day labor or materials were furnished. A foreclosure action must follow within six months of that date. On a multifamily job with a slow closeout, the four-month clock can expire while the punch list is still open. We put the last-furnishing date on the collections calendar at substantial completion, and your construction attorney handles any claim.

Colorado's payroll rules add cost that a bid written for another state will miss. The state's paid family and medical leave premium is 0.88 percent of wages in 2026, split evenly between employer and employee for companies with 10 or more people. Denver's minimum wage rose to $19.29 an hour on January 1, 2026, and applies to hours worked inside the city. Sales and use tax is collected by the state, home-rule cities, and special districts, so a contractor buying materials in one jurisdiction and installing in another can owe use tax it never charged for. We do not give tax advice. We make sure the labor burden and the job setup reflect where the work happens.

Trouble on the Front Range tends to arrive in the same order. The line of credit is fully drawn by February and does not come back down in May. Payroll taxes slip a quarter. A supply house in Commerce City moves you to COD. The surety asks for an updated WIP schedule and stops calling 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 Denver banks have workout groups that 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 slow. Industrial net absorption was 55,000 square feet in the second quarter of 2026 against direct vacancy of 8.3 percent, and residential growth has moved to Weld and Douglas counties. A framing contractor that staffed up for multifamily in the core and a site contractor turning down subdivision work in Weld County 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.

Hail is a business model and a balance-sheet risk in the same line. A Front Range storm season can double a roofing company's revenue in 90 days, and every dollar of it arrives as an insurance receivable with an adjuster, a supplement, and a depreciation holdback attached. The company hires, buys, and borrows against a season that may not repeat. We separate storm revenue from base revenue, forecast the insurance collections by carrier and stage, and size the credit line and the payroll to the base business, so a quiet year is a normal year rather than a crisis.

Public work along the Front Range is large and slow. The airport's Great Hall program runs to the end of 2027 with more projects lined up behind it, and the National Western Center's next phases follow the city council's approval of another $812 million in 2025. All of it runs on prevailing wage, certified payroll, retainage to the end, and pay cycles written for prime contractors. For a $10 million specialty sub, that work is steady and expensive to carry. We model the cash curve of a public package before you sign it and put the compliance cost in the bid.

Growth is running to Weld and Douglas counties, and the cash cycle follows the builders. A plumbing contractor that follows the production builders into Castle Rock, Parker, and the towns north of Brighton takes on draw schedules that pay by phase, not by month, at the same time it takes on new municipal licenses and new tax jurisdictions. We model the draw calendar against payroll before the first lot starts, and we add the licenses and the tax accounts to the setup list so nobody discovers them in an audit.

• Winter overhead financed from a seasonal forecast that extends past 13 weeks when it needs to
• Storm revenue separated from base revenue and insurance receivables forecast by carrier and stage
• Four-month lien statement clock and 10-day notice of intent tracked from the last-furnishing date
• Municipal general contractor licenses and home-rule sales-tax jurisdictions on one setup calendar
• Paid family leave premiums and the Denver minimum wage built into the labor burden
• Public-work packages modeled with certified payroll, retainage, and prime-contractor pay cycles
• Competition for accountants from engineering and energy firms answered with a documented, transferable process