Fractional CFO & Controller Services for Greenville Businesses

Upstate companies grow by becoming suppliers to someone much larger, and the larger customer sets the terms. A $6 million machine shop in Duncan lands a tooling package for a new model launch and a $4 million industrial contractor in Mauldin wins the plant's conveyor installation, and both just doubled their working capital need against a customer who pays in 60 days and expects the invoice to be perfect. Nobody told the bank. The bookkeeper who was fine at $6 million is closing the books six weeks late, inventory in the system does not match inventory on the floor, and the owner reads cash from the bank app on Woodruff Road.

The symptoms have a manufacturing accent. Receivables age past 60 days while the line covers payroll and a steel invoice. Gross margin looks fine at the quote and vanishes at the invoice because the OEM's chargebacks, freight terms, and engineering changes were never priced. For the contractor, the 90-day window to file a statement of account under South Carolina's lien statute closes while everyone waits on the construction manager's next draw. The plant's summer shutdown arrives, and two weeks of revenue disappear while the payroll does not. The controller has been almost caught up since the last launch.

The fix follows a sequence. Assess what is actually true about cash, margin, inventory, 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 $6 million supplier becomes a $20 million supplier 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 Upstate that means machine shops, fabricators, and tooling suppliers along I-85 from Anderson to Spartanburg, industrial and mechanical contractors doing plant installations, general contractors in Greenville and Simpsonville, electrical contractors and plumbing contractors on medical and logistics-park work, HVAC contractors and home-services companies in the Five Forks and Travelers Rest subdivisions, and the building-materials yards that supply them. We also work with logistics companies near the inland port and engineering firms downtown. The mix differs from Charleston, where the port sets the calendar, and from Charlotte, but the questions are the same.

The situations repeat. The owner still approves every check and reads cash from the bank balance. The controller left for an OEM or a tier-one supplier and the replacement was a bookkeeper with a better title. The bank wants a monthly borrowing base and a covenant certificate, and both are late or wrong. Revenue doubled on one launch and the close, the billing, and the collections did not. A sale, a family transition, or a partner buyout is coming and the books would not survive a quality-of-earnings review. Or cash is short after a shutdown, 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 Greenville CPA and attorney and we stay in our lane. 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, and suggest a second setup technician instead.

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 Greenville that means a 13-week cash forecast updated every Monday, a borrowing base that is managed rather than reconstructed, quote decisions made with margin data that includes chargebacks and freight, 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's launch calendar is your cash calendar.

Upstate lenders have financed suppliers through several model changeovers and they read borrowing base certificates and WIP schedules carefully. A machine shop taking on a launch package needs to know, before signing, whether the line can carry 60 days of receivables plus the raw material and tooling bought ahead of production, and what the advance rates do to the answer. An industrial contractor bidding a plant installation needs to fund 90 days of labor ahead of a first pay application. A distributor stocking for a new logistics park needs terms that match the tenant's move-in. 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 Greenville 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 inventory and job-cost ledgers that tie to the general ledger, produce a borrowing base certificate the bank can rely on and 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 manufacturer that includes standard costs that mean something, cycle counts that reconcile, and a chargeback log by customer. For a contractor it includes retainage tracking, change-order billing, and percentage-of-completion adjustments.

In Greenville the hard part is not the work. It is finding someone who can do it and keeping them. The OEMs, the tier-one suppliers, the engineering firms, and the health systems all hire from the same pool of experienced accountants, and a $10 million shop cannot outbid a global manufacturer's benefits package 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 Easley and Spartanburg.

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, inventory and job-cost reports, borrowing base or 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.

A South Carolina contractor's license is a financial statement with a wall plaque attached. The Contractor's Licensing Board at LLR places each general and mechanical contractor in a license group with a bid limit, and the group depends on the net worth or working capital on the statement you file. The 2023 rewrite of the statute raised the licensing threshold to jobs over $10,000 and requires licensees to meet the net worth or a working capital test at licensure and renewal to keep their group. For an industrial contractor in Greer whose plant packages have outgrown its group, the next bid's ceiling is the balance sheet, not the estimator. We keep that statement current and the working capital real.

Lien rights on a plant job start running before anyone in your office is watching. Once an owner or general contractor files a notice of project commencement, a subcontractor or supplier protects the full value of its work by serving a notice of furnishing; skip it, and the claim may be limited to what the owner still owes the general contractor. After last furnishing labor or materials, a claimant has 90 days to serve and record a statement of account and six months to bring suit. We do not give legal advice. We build the notice dates into job setup, flag day 60 in the collections calendar, and hand your attorney a file rather than a question.

Industrial work has a rhythm the Upstate knows well. Plant installations and shutdown work compress into two or three windows a year, usually around the summer and holiday shutdowns, and the sub that staffs up for a window carries the crew into the quiet weeks after it. 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 shutdown calendar and the notice calendar into the forecast rather than treating them as surprises.

Trouble in the Upstate usually arrives with a launch delay. The OEM pushes start of production a quarter, the tooling supplier that bought material and hired setup technicians for the old date is carrying both, and the industrial contractor that scheduled the installation has a crew and no plant access. The line is fully drawn. Payroll taxes slip a quarter. The bank asks for the borrowing base and finds ineligible receivables. By the time it 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, the actual inventory, and the actual payroll, not the budget. Then vendor and customer triage: who gets paid, who gets called, 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 strong at the plant gate and uneven behind it. Manufacturing and construction employment both grew over the year, the automaker's expansion is complete and its electric model is launching, and the inland port keeps setting records. But the suppliers that staffed up for programs that shifted between electric and combustion are carrying capacity the new schedule does not need, and a shop with the wrong mix of work is resizing while a competitor turns down purchase orders. Both need a real margin by customer and part, a cash forecast that goes past next Friday, and the discipline to stop taking work that loses money slowly.

Customer power is the Upstate condition. A supplier to a global automaker or one of its tier-one partners lives on the customer's payment terms, chargeback rules, quality audits, and launch calendar, and none of those are negotiable at $10 million in revenue. A $15 million shop with 60 percent of its sales in one program is a healthy business until the program's volume assumption changes, and the bank knows it. We build program concentration into the forecast, size the line to the real exposure, price chargebacks and freight into part-level margin, and push for a second and third anchor before the first one asks for the annual price-down.

Inventory and tooling are the second challenge. A launch requires raw material, fixtures, and gauges bought months before the first part ships, and the customer's tooling payment often arrives after the tooling is proven, not before. That gap is working capital, and it is invisible on a cash-basis statement until the line of credit is full. We carry tooling as its own line in the forecast, reconcile inventory to the floor every month, and make sure the borrowing base the bank sees matches the inventory and receivables that actually exist. Most inventory problems we find in the Upstate are counting problems that turned into financing problems.

Growth is the third. A region that added more than 85,000 residents in five years still cannot fill a machine shop or a job trailer, and wage pressure shows up in the quote two quarters before it shows up in the ledger. HVAC and home-services companies in the suburbs from Simpsonville to Travelers Rest see cash in a July wave and a January wave with thin shoulders between, and the answer is a maintenance-agreement base and a pre-season supplier line. For everyone else, the answer is the same: a WIP or inventory schedule that reconciles, margin by job or part that holds up under questions, and an owner who can explain both to a lender.

• OEM program concentration, chargebacks, and price-downs modeled in the forecast and the credit line
• Tooling and launch inventory carried as their own lines in the cash forecast
• Borrowing base certificates and cycle counts the bank can rely on
• South Carolina's 90-day statement-of-account deadline and notice of furnishing built into billing
• Plant shutdown windows and launch delays planned for in the forecast
• Contractor's Licensing Board and Residential Builders Commission financial packages kept current
• Competition with OEMs and tier-one suppliers for accounting talent answered with a documented process