Fractional CFO & Controller Services for Detroit Businesses

Detroit companies in our range are built around a customer that is bigger than they are. A supplier serves an automaker or a tier one. A contractor serves a hospital system, a utility, or a developer. A distributor serves all of them. That structure produces a specific finance problem: the customer sets the payment terms, the volume, and increasingly the price, and the supplier's back office is organized to react rather than plan. When the release changes or the tariff hits, the owner finds out from the bank balance.

The symptoms are consistent across the metro. The books are closed six weeks late because the controller is also the purchasing manager. Margin by part number or by job has never been calculated because the company was profitable in total until it was not. The line of credit was sized for 2023 volume and is now funding inventory the customer asked for and has not taken. The lender wants a borrowing base and a covenant certificate. A surety wants a WIP schedule. The owner wants to know whether to buy the next press, and nobody can tell him.

The fix follows a sequence. Assess what is 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 a departure. Then transition it to your team or a full-time hire when the company can support one. That sequence is how a Southeast Michigan supplier stops learning about its own business from its customer's purchasing department.

Our clients are privately held companies between roughly $3 million and $50 million in revenue, owned by the people who run them. Around Detroit that means tier-two and tier-three automotive suppliers in Warren, Sterling Heights, and Auburn Hills, tool and die shops in Macomb County, general contractors and mechanical contractors in Livonia and Troy working health-care and institutional projects, electrical and plumbing subs on the downtown developments, industrial-services and rigging companies along the I-94 corridor, building-materials distributors in the western suburbs, and the residential builders and remodelers working the neighborhoods where the city's population is growing again.

The situations repeat. A customer retimed a program and the cost structure has not noticed. Steel, aluminum, and imported components cost more than the quote assumed, and the customer will not accept a price change until next year. The bank wants monthly reporting the company has never produced. A surety has capped the bonding program because the financial statements are on cash basis. An acquisition is on the table, either buying a competitor whose owner wants out or selling to a consolidator, and the books would not survive diligence. Or the company is profitable on paper and out of cash in fact, because the profit is sitting in receivables and raw material.

You should call 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 before the books can support one, we will tell you on the first call, at no charge, and suggest a cheaper sequence.

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 Detroit that judgment gets applied to questions the region asks every quarter. What does a 30 percent release cut do to cash over the next 13 weeks, and what does the bank need to hear about it this week? Can the company absorb a tariff-driven material increase until the next pricing window, or does it need to open the conversation with the customer now? Should a $9 million contractor pursue subcontract packages on the downtown developments when the general contractor pays in 60 days and holds 10 percent retainage?

We answer those questions with a model, a bank conversation, and a decision, usually in the same week. The working tools are a 13-week cash forecast updated every Monday, a monthly package with margin by customer, part, or job, a lender relationship that is managed rather than endured, and a pricing discipline that puts material cost movement into the quote rather than the year-end surprise. The principal has integrated acquisitions and supported quality-of-earnings reviews, which is useful in a region where consolidation is the normal exit. The national overview of our fractional CFO service covers the full scope. This page is about how it works between Canton and Macomb Township.

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, surety, or buyer is asking for. Travel to Detroit is scoped in the engagement letter, and one-time cleanup and software are separate unless expressly included.

A controller makes the numbers true and on time. Ours close the month within 10 business days, keep a job-cost or product-cost ledger that ties to the general ledger, produce a WIP schedule the surety can read or an inventory report the bank can audit, run receivables and payables on a published calendar, and reconcile every bank, loan, and credit-card account monthly. For a supplier that means standard costs that reflect current material prices, scrap and rework tracked rather than absorbed, and customer tooling accounted for correctly. For a contractor it means retainage, change orders, and percentage-of-completion adjustments.

Southeast Michigan has a deep bench of manufacturing accountants, and the automakers, tier ones, and large contractors hire from it aggressively. A $12 million supplier competing for a controller who knows both cost accounting and a lender's borrowing base is competing with companies that offer a pension. A fractional controller solves that by running the function and documenting it, so the eventual hire inherits a close calendar, a reconciled ledger, and a written process. We work in QuickBooks, Sage 300 CRE, ServiceTitan, JD Edwards, and Power BI, and we have built reporting on top of the plant-floor systems Detroit suppliers actually run.

Controller engagements start at $2,500 per month. The scope is written on day one, the deliverables are the same every month, and the cash position can be 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.

Michigan licenses residential builders and residential maintenance and alteration contractors through the Department of Licensing and Regulatory Affairs on a three-year term, and it licenses electrical, plumbing, and mechanical contractors at the state level. Commercial general contracting is regulated locally rather than by a state license. The consequence that matters most for cash is in the lien statute: on residential projects, only contractors licensed as residential builders or residential maintenance and alteration contractors have lien rights at all. A remodeler working on an expired license has given away its most important collection tool without knowing it.

Michigan's Construction Lien Act runs on a 20-day clock for everyone without a direct contract with the owner. A subcontractor or supplier generally must deliver a notice of furnishing within 20 days of first providing labor or materials to preserve full lien rights. We put that date in the job setup so the notice goes out with mobilization, and we track the lien filing deadline by job on every aging report. Whether to record a lien is a decision for your attorney. Keeping the right alive is part of our billing process, not a legal afterthought.

Bonding capacity for the downtown, health-care, and infrastructure work is a separate matter, and it rests on the quality of your financial statements: a WIP schedule that reconciles to the ledger, gross margins by job that hold from bid to closeout, working capital that survives year end, and an owner who can explain the numbers to an underwriter. Michigan sureties have watched a lot of contractors grow into trouble on large projects, and they read WIP schedules carefully. We build the package they want to see and keep it current so the next bid is not delayed by the last close.

Trouble in Detroit usually starts with a customer decision and ends at the bank. A program is retimed, a release drops, or a tariff raises a material cost the customer will not cover, and the supplier's cash turns negative in a quarter. The line is fully drawn by the second month. Payroll taxes slip. A steel supplier moves the account to prepay. The lender asks for a forecast and gets last year's budget. By the time the owner calls, the company has been funded from personal savings for six months and the tooling is at risk.

We start with a 13-week cash forecast built from actual receivables, actual payables, actual payroll, and the actual customer releases, not the annual volume the program promised. 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 Detroit turnaround is the one that comes with an offer. A consolidator wants to buy a family supplier or a contractor, and the price depends on a quality-of-earnings review the company's books cannot survive. The fix is the same sequence, run faster: accrual financials, margin by customer, working capital normalized, add-backs documented. The principal has supported quality-of-earnings work from the seller's side. A company that has done that work sells for more, and a company that has not usually finds out during the retrade.

Tariffs are a working-capital problem before they are a margin problem. Michigan is among the most tariff-exposed states in the country, with most of the cost falling on raw materials, parts, and equipment that manufacturers buy, and the state's largest trading partner is across the river. A supplier that must pay more for steel today and cannot reprice until the next customer window is financing the difference from its line of credit. We model the material cost movement in the forecast, quantify the gap by customer, and prepare the pricing case before the window opens rather than after.

Customer concentration is the second challenge and it is structural. A supplier with 60 percent of revenue from one tier one, or a contractor with half its backlog on one hospital campus, has a good year ahead and a fragile balance sheet. Federal Reserve contacts in the district reported flat construction activity and labor shortages from retirements and immigration enforcement through the summer of 2026, which means the work and the workers are both uncertain. We report backlog and margin by customer, run the forecast with a scenario in which the largest one pauses, and size the overhead to survive it.

Winter is the third. Site work, paving, exterior masonry, and roofing stop or slow from December through March, and a contractor tied to those trades earns most of its margin in eight months and pays for twelve. Interior work continues, but the equipment, the line, and the office do not pause. We build the seasonal curve into the forecast, size the credit line to the February trough, and push interior and service billing into the months when the exterior crews are idle. It is not complicated. It is just rarely done.

• Tariff-driven material cost swings modeled in the forecast and priced into customer negotiations
• Customer and program concentration measured, reported, and stress-tested
• Residential builder licensing status tied to lien rights and tracked with the license calendar
• Notice of furnishing at 20 days and lien deadlines built into job setup
• Surety capacity supported by a WIP schedule that reconciles to the ledger
• Seasonal cash curve from thaw to freeze built into credit lines and equipment payments
• Sale and acquisition readiness with accrual financials and documented add-backs