Fractional CFO & Controller Services for Indianapolis Businesses

Indianapolis contractors and service companies rarely fail from lack of work. They fail from the distance between the field and the ledger. A mechanical contractor doing $9 million a year that wins a $4 million package on a Boone County manufacturing site has increased its working-capital need by half, and the bank has not been told. The bookkeeper who was adequate at $4 million is closing the books six weeks late. The WIP schedule is a spreadsheet the estimator updates when the surety asks. The owner reads cash from the bank app and calls that a forecast.

The symptoms are familiar across the metro. Receivables age past 60 days while the line of credit covers payroll. Job margins look fine at bid and vanish at closeout because change orders were performed and never billed. A lender asks for a covenant certificate and gets a shrug. The company runs three entities and one QuickBooks file. Meanwhile every construction accountant in the city already has an offer from a hospital system, a pharmaceutical company, or a national contractor with a downtown office and a better parking spot.

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. That sequence, Assess, Clean up, Stabilize, Document, Transition, is how a $5 million contractor in Greenwood becomes a $20 million contractor 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 Central Indiana that means general contractors in Carmel and Fishers building the multifamily and commercial projects that follow Hamilton County's growth, electrical and mechanical contractors working the Boone County campuses and the logistics parks along I-70 in Plainfield and Whitestown, plumbing and HVAC contractors serving the suburbs from Avon to Greenwood, homebuilders and site contractors in Westfield and Noblesville, building-materials yards and distributors, and the home-services and professional-services firms that grow with a metro adding residents every year.

The situations repeat. The owner still approves every check. The controller left, or was never really a controller. The bank wants monthly covenant reporting and a WIP schedule, and both are late. A surety has capped the bonding program until the financial statements are credible. A pharmaceutical or data-center prime requires a subcontractor with monthly financials and a documented accounting system. Revenue doubled since 2022 and the close, the billing, and the collections did not. 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 the people who do those things and we stay in our lane. And 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 practice that means a 13-week cash-flow forecast updated every Monday, a bank relationship that is managed rather than endured, bid and pricing decisions made with margin data instead of instinct, 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 between Lebanon and Franklin.

Indianapolis lenders are conservative, which is a compliment in this business, and they read WIP schedules carefully. A contractor deciding whether to pursue a LEAP District package needs to know, before signing, whether it can fund 60 to 90 days of labor and material ahead of a first pay application and whether the prime's documentation requirements will add a person to the office. A home-services company buying a competitor in Hamilton County needs a forecast that survives the first winter. Those are CFO questions. We answer them with a model, a bank conversation, and a decision, usually in the same week.

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 and surety are asking for. Travel to Indianapolis is scoped in the engagement letter, and one-time cleanup and software 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, and reconcile every bank, loan, and credit-card account monthly. For a contractor that includes retainage tracking, change-order billing, and the percentage-of-completion adjustments that turn a cash-basis guess into a real margin. For a home-services company it means revenue by technician and by service line, and a maintenance-agreement base that is deferred correctly.

In Indianapolis the hard part is not the work. It is finding someone who can do it and keeping them, when the pharmaceutical companies, the hospital systems, and the national contractors hire from the same pool and pay from a different budget. A fractional controller solves that by running the function and documenting it, so the next 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, which covers most of what is installed between Brownsburg and Lawrence.

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

Indiana has no statewide general contractor license. Licensing runs through cities and counties, and in Marion County most of it runs through the City of Indianapolis Department of Business and Neighborhood Services, whose general contractor license covers the county except Lawrence, Beech Grove, Speedway, and Southport. Cross into Hamilton, Hendricks, or Boone County and the rules change again. A contractor working in five jurisdictions carries five license calendars, and an expired one can stop a permit and a pay application on the same day. We keep the calendar and tie it to the job list.

None of that sets your bonding capacity. A surety does, on the strength of a WIP schedule that reconciles to the ledger, gross margins by job that hold from bid to closeout, working capital that does not vanish at year end, and an owner who can explain the numbers. Indiana sureties see a lot of contractors grow fast into the LEAP District work, and they have learned to read a WIP schedule for the change orders that were performed and never billed. We build the package and keep it current so the spring bid is not held up by the winter close.

Indiana's lien statute is short on the back end. A mechanic's lien must be recorded within 60 days of last furnishing on residential projects and 90 days on commercial projects. On owner-occupied residential work, a subcontractor without a direct contract must also serve a pre-lien notice, within 60 days of first furnishing on new construction and 30 days on renovation. Miss the notice and the lien right is gone. We put the dates in the job setup and on every aging report, so the option exists when the attorney asks. Whether to use it is their call and yours.

Trouble in Indianapolis usually announces itself in the same order. The line of credit is fully drawn in April and stays that way. Payroll taxes slip a quarter. A supplier moves the account 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 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-flow 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 the first time. Our turnaround CFO and 13-week cash-flow forecast pages cover the mechanics.

The Marion County data-center moratorium created a specific kind of trouble for a specific kind of contractor. An electrical or mechanical sub that staffed and equipped for a Decatur Township campus now has crews and a cost structure aimed at work that will not start before 2028 in the county, while the Boone County and Hamilton County pipeline continues. That company needs an honest backlog by jurisdiction, a plan for redeploying crews, and a cash forecast with a scenario in which the county work never returns. It is better to build that plan in a spreadsheet than at the bank.

Jurisdiction is a line item. Central Indiana's growth is spread across a ring of counties and suburban cities, each with its own licensing, permitting, and inspection cadence, and a contractor that works across the ring carries administrative cost that a single-city contractor does not. We track licenses by jurisdiction, tie them to the job list, and price the compliance labor into the overhead rate rather than absorbing it as a surprise. The Marion County moratorium is the sharpest example: the same trade, the same crew, and a different answer depending on which side of 96th Street the site sits.

Winter is the second. Site work, paving, foundations, and exterior trades slow or stop from December through March, and a contractor tied to them earns most of its margin in eight months and pays for twelve. Interior and service 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 billing into the months when the exterior crews are idle. Homebuilders carry the mirror problem: closings cluster in spring and fall, and the lot inventory is paid for in January.

The third challenge is the scale of the LEAP District work itself. A $10 million sub that wins a $6 million package on a pharmaceutical or data-center site is now a different company, with a prime that requires monthly financials, a documentation review before every payment, and a retainage balance that will not release until commissioning. The margin is real. So is the working capital. We model days-to-cash by project, build the pre-qualification package the primes ask for, and make sure the company can fund the mobilization before the bid goes out rather than after the award.

• License calendars by city and county tied to the job list and priced into overhead
• Seasonal cash curve from thaw to freeze built into credit lines and equipment payments
• LEAP District and campus work modeled as days-to-cash with prime documentation costs included
• Surety capacity supported by a WIP schedule that reconciles to the ledger
• Lien deadlines at 60 and 90 days and residential pre-lien notices tracked from job setup
• Marion County moratorium scenarios built into backlog and staffing plans
• Competition for construction accounting talent answered with a documented, transferable process