Fractional CFO & Controller Services for Houston Businesses

Houston companies do not fail from lack of work. They fail from timing. An industrial electrical contractor in Pasadena books a $6 million package on a Ship Channel expansion, staffs up for a spring turnaround season, and finds that the owner's payment cycle, the general contractor's retainage, and the union's monthly remittances all point the same direction: cash out now, cash in later. The bookkeeper who could handle $4 million of commercial work cannot handle certified payroll and a WIP schedule at the same time.

The symptoms repeat across the metro. Receivables age past 60 days while the line of credit covers payroll. Turnaround work is bid on labor hours and lost on standby time nobody billed. A general contractor in Katy has three jobs under-billed and one over-billed and does not know which is which. The bank asks for a covenant certificate and gets an apology. Meanwhile, every construction accountant in Harris County who knows a WIP schedule from a wish list has a standing offer on the Energy Corridor.

The fix is 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 without us. Then transition it to your team.

Our clients are privately held companies between roughly $3 million and $50 million in revenue, owned by the people who run them. In Houston that means industrial and commercial general contractors, electrical contractors and instrumentation subs working the petrochemical corridor from Baytown to Texas City, HVAC contractors and plumbing contractors running fleets out of Spring and Cypress, civil and site contractors building in Fort Bend and Montgomery counties, fabricators and distributors along the Ship Channel, and home-services firms.

The situations repeat. The owner approves every check and cannot say what next month looks like. The controller left for an energy company and took the close calendar in her head. The bank wants monthly reporting and a WIP schedule, and both are late. A surety has capped bonding because the year-end financials could not explain the under-billings. Revenue doubled on one industrial customer and the company is now that customer's unpaid bank. A sale, a partner buyout, or a hurricane claim is coming and the books would not survive scrutiny.

You should hire 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 hand them cleaner books. If your plan is to hire a full-time CFO and hope the ledger cleans itself before he arrives, 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 bank relationship that is managed instead of endured, bid decisions made with margin 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 the Ship Channel and The Woodlands.

Houston lenders have financed more than one energy cycle, and they read a contractor's customer concentration as closely as its WIP schedule. A fabricator with half its revenue from one refinery needs a credit line and a covenant package that can survive that refinery's next capital freeze. A civil contractor chasing port and highway work needs to know, before bidding, whether it can carry 90 days of labor and material ahead of a first pay application. 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 Houston 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 an industrial contractor that includes certified payroll, per-diem tracking, union remittances, and time-and-material billing with backup the owner will accept.

In Houston the hard part is not the work. It is keeping the person who does it. Energy companies, engineering firms, and the medical center hire from the same pool of construction accountants, and a $12 million contractor cannot outbid them 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 Katy and Baytown.

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 has no statewide general contractor license. 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 the City of Houston and the surrounding counties add their own registration and permitting. The real gate on growth is the surety and, on industrial sites, the owner's prequalification. Both rest on a credible WIP schedule, consistent gross margin by job, working capital that is still there at year end, and an owner who can explain the numbers. We build that package and keep it current.

Texas lien law runs on a calendar. 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. On a plant site with three tiers of contractors between you and the owner, the notice is the only protection a sub has, and it expires. We put the deadlines into the billing calendar 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 its materials; a separated contract makes it a retailer that collects tax on incorporated materials, and nonresidential repair and remodeling is taxable regardless of form. We do not give tax advice. We make sure the job setup, the 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 Houston tends to announce itself the same way. The line of credit is fully drawn after spring turnaround season and never comes back down. Payroll taxes slip a quarter. A supplier on the east side moves you to COD. The surety asks for an updated WIP schedule and stops returning calls. 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 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.

Houston's cycle is uneven inside a single company. Infrastructure and civil work cooled from its 2025 pace while building construction and specialty trades picked up the slack, and a contractor with one foot in each is resizing one division while starving the other. The right response is the same in both: a real margin by job, a forecast that goes past next Friday, and the discipline to stop taking work that loses money slowly. One of these companies will discover that its proudest customer has never paid on time.

Hurricane season is a line item. Beryl came ashore in July 2024 and left more than 2.2 million Houston-area customers without power, and the National Weather Service's outlook for the 2026 Atlantic season called for eight to 14 named storms. For a contractor that means jobs that stop, receivables that freeze while the owner's claim is adjusted, and then a wave of emergency work that arrives all at once. For HVAC contractors and plumbing contractors it means a surge that must be staffed and financed before it is billed. We build a storm scenario into the forecast every June so the cash reserve and the collection plan exist before the cone does.

Industrial customers pay well and slowly. A plant owner's terms, a general contractor's retainage, and a union's monthly remittance calendar together can put a sub 90 days out of pocket on a job that is profitable on paper. Add per-diem crews, certified payroll, and standby time that was never billed, and a 15 percent margin at bid becomes five at closeout. We model the cash curve before the contract is signed, size the line to it, and make time-and-material backup a daily routine.

Growth in the suburbs adds a different problem. Montgomery and Fort Bend counties are absorbing new residents by the tens of thousands, and the home-services, remodeling, and site-work companies serving them are scaling faster than their reporting. A company that doubles 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. The port's record year means more inventory bought before it is sold.

• Storm-season cash scenarios, credit reserves, and collection plans built every June
• Industrial pay cycles, retainage, and union remittances modeled before a package is signed
• Certified payroll, per-diem, and standby-time billing turned into routine, not month-end panic
• Texas lien notice deadlines built into the monthly billing process
• Lump-sum versus separated contract treatment captured for the CPA on maintenance work
• Customer concentration reported to the bank before the bank asks about it
• Competition for construction accountants answered with a documented, transferable process