Fractional CFO & Controller Services for Fresno Businesses

Fresno contractors grow on public and institutional work, and public work pays slowly, precisely, and with paperwork. A $7 million underground contractor in Clovis wins a $5 million package on a city water main job and a $3 million package on a school district project in the same season. The company just doubled its working capital need, added certified payroll on two projects, and picked up a retention balance that will not release until closeout. The bookkeeper who was fine at $7 million is now closing the books seven weeks late, the WIP schedule is a spreadsheet the bonding agent stopped trusting, and the owner reads cash from the bank app in the truck.

The symptoms have a California flavor. Receivables age past 60 days while the line covers a payroll that is larger than it used to be because the state minimum wage rose to $16.90 in January 2026 and prevailing-wage rates rose with it. Change orders were performed and never billed. The 20-day preliminary notice was sent on some jobs and not others. Retention on private work is now capped at 5 percent for contracts signed in 2026, which helps, but nobody updated the billing template. The controller has been almost caught up since the almond harvest.

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 to a full-time hire when the company can support one. Assess, Clean up, Stabilize, Document, Transition. It is how a $7 million contractor carries $8 million of new packages 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 the Valley that means general contractors in Fresno and Clovis, underground and paving companies on the municipal and rail work, electrical contractors and mechanical subs on the hospital, school, and airport projects, HVAC contractors and plumbing contractors serving the Clovis and northeast Fresno subdivisions, and the concrete, aggregate, and building-materials suppliers that feed all of them. We also work with ag-services and packing operations in Selma and Reedley, trucking and cold-storage companies along 99, home-services companies, and professional-services firms.

The situations repeat. The owner still signs every check and reads cash from the bank balance. The controller left for a hospital system or the county and the replacement was a bookkeeper with a better title. The bank wants monthly covenant reporting and a WIP schedule, and both are late. A surety has capped the program until the financials are credible. Revenue doubled on two public packages and the close, the certified payroll, and the collections did not. A sale, a family transition, or a partner buyout is coming and the books would not survive diligence. Or cash is short, vendors are calling, and the owner needs a plan rather than a pep talk.

You should hire someone else if you need bookkeeping alone, tax preparation, an audit opinion, or legal advice. We coordinate with your Fresno CPA and attorney and we stay in our lane, which in California is a narrower lane than most. If your plan is to hire a full-time CFO and hope the books fix themselves, 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 Fresno that means a 13-week cash forecast updated every Monday, a bank relationship that is managed rather than endured, bid decisions made with margin data that includes the real labor burden, and a monthly package that tells you where the money went and where it is going. The national overview of our fractional CFO service covers the full scope. This page is about how it works in a market where the customer is often a public agency and the payroll is the largest line on the statement.

Valley lenders have financed contractors and growers through more than one drought and they read WIP schedules carefully. A contractor pricing a public package needs to know, before signing, whether it can fund 90 days of prevailing-wage labor ahead of a first progress payment and what retention does to the answer. An ag-services company needs a line that peaks at harvest and rests in February. A distributor financing inventory for a spring building season needs terms that match the customer's draw cycle. 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, urgency, and how much the bank and surety are asking for. One-time cleanup, software, and travel to Fresno 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 Valley contractor that includes retention tracking, change-order billing, percentage-of-completion adjustments, and a certified-payroll reconciliation that ties the labor on the job to the labor in the ledger, because in California the two are audited separately.

In Fresno the hard part is not the work. It is finding someone who can do it and keeping them. The hospital systems, the county, the university, and the large ag operations all hire from the same pool of experienced accountants, and a $10 million contractor cannot outbid a public pension for long. 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, which covers most of what is installed between Madera and Visalia.

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

California licenses contractors statewide through the Contractors State License Board, and since January 2025 the exemption for unlicensed work has been $1,000 for jobs that need no permit and no employees, which means nearly everything a real company does requires a license, a bond, and workers' compensation on file. Surety capacity for bonded public work rests on the quality of your financial statements: a credible WIP schedule, consistent gross margins by job, working capital that does not evaporate at year end, and an owner who can explain the numbers. We build the package the surety and the bank want to see, and we keep it current so a public bid is not held up by the last close.

Two California rules shape cash for every Fresno contractor. The 20-day preliminary notice preserves lien and stop-payment rights for subs and suppliers, and it is only worth anything if it goes out on time on every job. And for private contracts signed on or after January 1, 2026, retention is capped at 5 percent under Civil Code section 8811, which changes the billing template and the cash curve on every new private job. We do not give legal advice. We do put the notice dates and the retention terms into the job setup so your attorney gets a call on day 15 rather than day 25, and so the forecast reflects the money you are actually allowed to hold or owed.

Prevailing wage is the third. Public work in the Valley carries certified payroll, fringe reporting, and apprenticeship ratios, and the labor cost that goes into the bid has to match the labor cost that goes into the ledger and the report. The principal has managed job costing, lender reporting, and mechanic's lien and claims coordination for multi-entity contractors, and our construction CFO work builds the notice calendar and the certified-payroll tie-out into the close rather than treating them as compliance afterthoughts.

Trouble in the Valley usually announces itself in the same order. The line of credit is fully drawn in March and stays that way. Payroll taxes slip a quarter, which in California brings a letter quickly. Vendors move you 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 the business from personal savings for six months and calls 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 the actual receivables, the actual payables, and the 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 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 current cycle is uneven. Metro employment grew 2.5 percent over the year while construction employment slipped, because the growth is in health care and public sector work while private residential and commercial starts wait on interest rates and financing. A framing contractor tied to Clovis subdivisions and an underground contractor on rail and municipal work are in different businesses this year, and both are paying $16.90 or more for every entry-level hour. Both need a real margin by job, a cash forecast that goes past next Friday, and the discipline to stop taking work that loses money slowly.

Labor cost is the Fresno condition. The state minimum wage of $16.90 sets the floor, prevailing wage sets the rate on public work, and the agricultural calendar sets the competition, because a crew that can drive a loader can also drive a harvester in September and will go where the pay is. Bids priced in February do not survive a summer in which the labor market tightened around the harvest. We build labor-burden curves by month into the forecast, tie certified payroll to the ledger, and price the real cost of an hour into every estimate before the estimator does.

Weather and water set the calendar. Tule fog shuts down early-morning site work for weeks in December and January, summer heat above 100 degrees pushes crews to dawn starts and split shifts, and the water year decides whether the ag customers who buy your services, your trucks, and your steel have money in the fall. HVAC contractors and home-services companies see demand and cash arrive in a summer wave, with a thin shoulder in spring and fall. The right structure is a maintenance-agreement base that smooths revenue, a supplier line sized to the pre-season buy, and a cash forecast that carries the company from October to May.

California's compliance calendar is the third challenge, and it is heavier here than in any other state we serve. Certified payroll, workers' compensation audits, CSLB renewals, sales and use tax on materials, the Employment Development Department, and the paid-leave and wage rules that changed again in 2026 all land on a growing company at once, and each one carries a penalty for being late. None of those positions are ours to decide. They belong with your CPA, your attorney, and your payroll provider. Our job is to make sure the ledger, the job files, and the calendar give them clean answers and give you no surprises.

• Minimum wage, prevailing wage, and harvest-season labor competition priced into bids and forecasts
• 20-day preliminary notices and the new 5 percent private retention cap built into job setup
• Certified payroll tied to the job-cost ledger every month
• Fog, heat, and water-year effects reserved for in the cash forecast
• Surety and CSLB financial packages kept current so public bids are not held up
• Growth financing sized to the working capital a public package actually requires
• Competition for accounting talent answered with a documented, transferable process