Fractional CFO & Controller Services for Jacksonville Businesses

Northeast Florida companies grow into their problems. A roofing and gutter contractor in Orange Park that did $3 million on residential replacement work wins a package on a distribution center off I-95 in Nassau County and a school in St. Johns, and revenue doubles inside 18 months. So does the receivable balance, the retainage held by the general contractor, and the payroll between pay applications. The bookkeeper who could keep up when every job closed in two weeks is now trying to run percentage-of-completion accounting in a spreadsheet, and has been almost caught up since Easter.

The symptoms are the same from the Beaches to Middleburg. Receivables age past 60 days while the line of credit covers the crews. Change orders get built on a text message and never billed. The notice to owner on a large project went out late, or not at all, and nobody knows which. The surety asks for a WIP schedule and gets last year's tax return with a cover letter. And the one accountant who understood all of it took a job at a bank downtown, a logistics company at the port, or a hospital system with tuition reimbursement.

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 or to a full-time hire when the company can support one. That is how a $3 million contractor becomes a $12 million contractor without the accounting department becoming the reason the surety says no or the bank says later.

Our clients are privately held companies between roughly $3 million and $50 million in revenue, run by the people who own them. In Jacksonville that means general contractors building in St. Johns and Clay Counties, HVAC contractors and plumbing contractors serving the subdivisions from Nocatee to Yulee, electrical contractors on commercial and industrial work along I-95 and the Westside, roofing and exterior contractors that live on storm season, marine and dock builders along the river and the Intracoastal, and the building-materials and equipment suppliers behind them.

We also work with the service economy the region is built on: logistics and drayage companies serving the port, home-services firms, medical and dental groups, professional-services firms, and the distributors that supply the retail and hospitality trade from Fernandina Beach to St. Augustine. The situations repeat: the owner still signs every check and cannot state gross margin by job; the controller left, or was never really a controller; the bank wants monthly reporting and a WIP schedule and both are late; a sale or partner buyout is coming and the books would not survive diligence; or cash is short and the supply house has moved the account to COD.

You should hire someone else if you need bookkeeping alone, tax preparation, an audit opinion, or legal advice. We coordinate with your CPA and your attorney and we stay in our lane. If your plan is to hire a full-time CFO and hope the books repair themselves, we will explain on the first call, at no charge, why the books usually win that contest.

A fractional CFO gives you the judgment of a chief financial officer for a fraction of the week and a fraction of the cost. For a Jacksonville contractor that means a 13-week cash forecast updated every Monday that reflects the actual pay-application calendar and the actual retainage schedule, a bank relationship managed with a monthly package rather than an annual apology, and bid decisions made with margin data by job type instead of by memory. The national fractional CFO page covers the full scope. This page is about how it works in Duval County.

Jacksonville lenders have financed several housing cycles and a decade of logistics buildout, and they read WIP schedules carefully. A contractor deciding whether to bid a package on the stadium district, a warehouse in North Jacksonville, or a school in St. Johns needs to know before signing whether it can fund 90 days of labor and material ahead of the first draw, and what a pay-when-paid clause does to that number. A service company deciding whether to open a second branch in St. Augustine needs to know what the branch has to bill to carry itself. Those are CFO questions. We answer them with a model, a bank conversation, and a decision, usually inside 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 what the bank and surety are asking for. Travel to Jacksonville 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 ledger that ties to the general ledger, produce a WIP schedule the surety and the bank can read, run receivables and payables on a published calendar, and reconcile every bank, loan, and credit-card account monthly. For a Florida contractor that includes retainage receivable by job, change-order billing with written authorization attached, and the notice-to-owner calendar that keeps lien rights alive on every project where you are not the prime.

The hard part on the First Coast is not the work. It is finding someone who can do it and keeping them. The banks and insurers downtown, the logistics companies at the port, the hospital systems, and the national homebuilders active in St. Johns County all hire from the same pool of accountants, and a $10 million subcontractor in Orange Park cannot outbid them for long. A fractional controller solves the retention problem by running the function remotely and documenting it, so the next hire inherits a process rather than a mystery. We work in QuickBooks, Sage 300 CRE, ServiceTitan, JD Edwards, and Power BI, which covers most of what is installed between Fernandina Beach and Green Cove Springs.

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.

Florida licenses contractors through the Department of Business and Professional Regulation, and the license comes in two forms: a certified license, earned by examination, that allows work statewide, and a registered license that is limited to a specific county or city. Both require a showing of financial responsibility. The board generally looks for a minimum FICO score of 660 for the applicant and the business, and an applicant below that score posts a bond or letter of credit, $20,000 for Division I licenses such as general, building, and residential contractors, and $10,000 for Division II specialty licenses, with the amount cut in half after a financial responsibility course. In other words, the owner's personal credit is part of the company's license, and we treat it that way in planning.

Florida's construction lien law runs on a calendar that does not care how busy you are. A subcontractor or supplier without a direct contract with the owner protects its rights by serving a notice to owner within 45 days of first furnishing labor or materials, and a claim of lien must be recorded within 90 days of last furnishing. Miss the first deadline and the receivable becomes a negotiation. None of that is legal advice, and we do not give it. What we do is build the notice calendar into the billing process so the same person who issues the pay application confirms the notice went out, and your construction attorney is called before a deadline rather than after one. Our principal has managed mechanic's liens, claims, and litigation support coordination for multi-entity contractors.

Bonding capacity rests on financial statements a surety can trust: a WIP schedule that reconciles to the ledger, consistent gross margins by job, working capital that is real at year end, and an owner who can explain the numbers. School-district, county, and port work require bonds, and the surety's appetite for your program is set by your last statement. A construction CFO builds the package the surety wants and keeps it current so the next bid is not held up by the last close. We also coordinate with your CPA on Florida sales tax treatment for contracts, because the job setup determines what the CPA can defend. Orlando and Tampa contractors face the same rules with different customers, and the process travels.

Trouble in Jacksonville tends to follow a storm or a slowdown. The roofing contractor that staffed up after a hurricane season is carrying that payroll into a quiet spring. The framing sub tied to a builder that paused starts in St. Johns County has trucks, crews, and no draws. The line of credit is fully drawn in March and stays that way. Payroll taxes slip a quarter. The supply house wants a check before the next delivery. The owner has been funding the gap from personal savings since January and calls it temporary. 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, in writing. Then a lender conversation with a plan attached, because banks extend patience to borrowers who show up with numbers and a calendar. 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 2026 cycle on the First Coast is a rebalancing. Industrial development slowed sharply after years of speculative building, job growth was modest, and unemployment drifted up, while the stadium, downtown residential, and the port kept the largest contractors busy. A warehouse-focused electrical sub is resizing at the same time a mechanical contractor on the stadium is turning down work. Both need the same discipline: real margin by job, a cash forecast that goes past next Friday, and the resolve to stop taking work that loses money slowly. One of them is about to discover that its best customer was never profitable, and it is cheaper to discover that in a spreadsheet.

Hurricane season is a line on the calendar and a line in the forecast. From June through November a First Coast contractor carries two plans: the one where the season is quiet and the one where a storm stops outdoor work for a week, floods the phones with emergency calls, and pushes a year of roofing and restoration revenue into 90 days. Emergency work is billed fast and collected slowly, often through insurers with their own documentation and their own timeline. We model both scenarios in the 13-week forecast, keep a storm-season line of credit sized to the surge, and build the insurer billing package so the cash arrives in weeks rather than quarters.

Long payment chains are the second challenge. A specialty sub on the stadium, a distribution center, or a hospital expansion may sit three tiers below the owner, behind a pay-when-paid clause and a retainage schedule that releases at final completion. Public work brings school-board and county payment cycles that run on meeting dates. Working capital has to be sized to the slowest customer, not the average one. We model the receivable calendar by customer type and size the line of credit to match, so the bank sees the need before the payroll does.

Growth financing rounds out the list. A contractor riding the St. Johns County housing wave needs working capital it has not earned yet, and lenders will finance growth only when the reporting proves the growth is profitable. Equipment finance for a service fleet needs a replacement schedule, not a reaction to the next breakdown. Owners planning an exit need two years of clean statements before the conversation starts, and the buyers active in Florida home services will read every one of them. We build the reporting that makes the growth financeable and the company sellable, in that order.

• Hurricane-season scenarios, emergency billing, and insurer collections built into the cash forecast
• Florida notice-to-owner and claim-of-lien deadlines built into billing, in coordination with counsel
• DBPR financial responsibility, personal credit, and bond requirements planned alongside the balance sheet
• Pay-when-paid, retainage, and public-entity payment cycles modeled by customer
• Surety and bank packages built on a WIP schedule that reconciles to the general ledger
• Growth and equipment financing sized to backlog rather than hope
• Construction accounting talent competition answered with a documented, transferable process