Fractional CFO & Controller Services for Kansas City Businesses

Kansas City contractors and service companies are not short of work. They are short of the working capital, the reporting, and the people to manage a backlog that doubled in two years across two states. A mechanical contractor in Olathe that wins a data-center package in Clay County has just taken on 90 days of labor and material ahead of the first pay application, a construction manager that reviews every invoice line, a Missouri payroll it has never run, and a retainage balance that will not be released until commissioning. The bookkeeper who was fine at $5 million in Kansas is closing the books seven weeks late in both states.

The symptoms repeat across the metro. Receivables age past 60 days while the line covers payroll. Job margins that looked fine at bid vanish at closeout because change orders were performed and never billed. The lender wants a covenant certificate and a borrowing base and receives neither. The controller left in March for an engineering firm, and the search is still open. Meanwhile the owner is bidding the next campus package because the estimator says the margin is there, without knowing whether the last one made money after the wage increases.

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, one entity and one state at a time. Stabilize the weekly cash cycle and the monthly close. Document the process so it survives without us. Then transition it to your team or a full-time hire when the company can support one. That sequence, Assess, Clean up, Stabilize, Document, Transition, is how a $7 million sub in Shawnee becomes a $25 million sub 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 Kansas City that means electrical contractors, HVAC contractors, and plumbing contractors working the Northland data-center campuses and the De Soto industrial park, general contractors in Overland Park and Lee's Summit building the multifamily and logistics projects that follow the population, site, concrete, and utility contractors staged for the stadium districts, building-materials yards and distributors along I-35 and I-70, home-services companies in Johnson County and the Northland suburbs, and the engineering, logistics, and professional-services firms that serve a metro at the center of the country's freight map.

The situations repeat. The owner still signs every check and reads cash from the bank app. The company crossed the state line and the accounting did not. A surety has capped the program because the financial statements are prepared on a cash basis. A data-center construction manager requires a subcontractor with monthly financials, a documented safety program, and a real accounting system, and the company has one of the three. A partner buyout is 12 months out. Or cash is short in a company that is profitable on paper, because the profit is sitting in retainage on two campuses.

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 to fix books that a good fractional controller could fix in a quarter, we will say so 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 Kansas City that judgment goes to the questions the campuses force on every contractor. Can a $12 million electrical contractor fund the mobilization on a $6 million data-center package before the first draw, and what does that do to the line? What happens to the forecast if a campus pauses after a referendum or a lawsuit, as one in Independence might? Which entity should hold the Missouri work and which the Kansas work, and what does that mean for withholding and the Kansas City, Missouri earnings tax?

We do not decide the tax position. We put it in the forecast and get your CPA in the room before the first invoice goes out. The working tools are a 13-week cash forecast updated every Monday, a monthly package with margin by job and by customer, a lender relationship that is managed rather than endured, and a bid discipline that checks working capital before the estimate leaves the building. The national overview of our fractional CFO service covers the full scope. This page is about how it works between De Soto and Blue Springs.

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 Kansas City 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 instead of a mood, and reconcile every bank, loan, and credit-card account monthly. For a two-state contractor that includes entity-level books that stand on their own, retainage tracked by job and by state, change-order billing, and the percentage-of-completion adjustments that turn a cash-basis guess into a real margin. For a distributor it means inventory that ties to the count and a borrowing base the bank can audit.

In Kansas City the hard part is not the work. It is finding someone who can do it when the engineering firms, the data-center operators, the large general contractors, and the health systems all hire from the same pool of construction and cost accountants, and a $10 million sub cannot outbid them for long. A fractional controller solves that by running the function and documenting it, so the next hire inherits a close calendar and 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 Liberty and Olathe.

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 by entity and consolidated, 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.

Neither Missouri nor Kansas issues a state general contractor license, so licensing in the metro happens city by city. Kansas City, Missouri issues Class A, B, and C general contractor licenses tied to project size and requires a certificate of qualification for each trade. On the Kansas side, Johnson County runs a shared licensing program for Olathe, Lenexa, Leawood, and most of the county's cities, with an International Code Council exam as the entry ticket. A contractor working both sides of the line carries two sets of licenses and two building departments. None of that sets bonding capacity. A surety does, on the strength of a WIP schedule that reconciles and working capital that is real.

The lien calendars do not match either. In Missouri a subcontractor generally must serve the owner a notice of intent to lien at least 10 days before filing, and the lien statement is due within six months of the last work. In Kansas a subcontractor generally has three months from last furnishing to file, and a contractor in direct contract with the owner has four. On a hyperscale campus with a dozen tiers of subs, the Kansas three months can pass while the pay application is still in review. We put the correct calendar in the job setup for each project and track the deadlines on every aging report. Whether to file is your attorney's call.

Tax follows the same split. Kansas City, Missouri levies an earnings tax on wages and profits earned inside the city, Kansas and Missouri withhold separately, and the sales-tax treatment of materials on the campuses depends on incentive agreements that vary by project. Port KC's bond authorization for the Clay County campus, for example, carried sales-tax exemptions on construction materials. We keep the schedules, set up the ledger so each state stands on its own, and make sure the CPA has what they need to file in both. We do not give tax advice. We make sure it is in the bid.

Trouble in Kansas City arrives from success. A contractor takes a Northland campus package and a De Soto package at once, funds both mobilizations from the line, and discovers in month four that one construction manager's pay-application review takes 45 days and the other holds 10 percent retainage until commissioning. The line is fully drawn. Payroll taxes slip a quarter, in one state or both. A supplier in North Kansas City moves the account to COD. By the time the bank calls, the owner has been funding payroll from a home equity line for five months and calling it a bridge.

We start with a 13-week cash-flow forecast built from actual receivables, actual payables, and actual payroll, by entity. 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 other Kansas City turnaround is the campus that pauses. A hyperscale project can stop after a referendum, a lawsuit, or a capital decision made in California, and a sub that staffed for a three-year run is left carrying overhead built for revenue that stopped. That company needs backlog by owner and by expected start date, an honest conversation about which crews and which equipment it can carry, and a cash forecast with a scenario in which the next campus pauses too. One of these subs is going to discover that the data-center work was carrying the rest of the company, and it is better to see that in a spreadsheet.

The state line is the first challenge, and it reaches every line of the ledger. Payroll withholding, unemployment insurance, workers' compensation, sales and use tax on materials, contractor licensing, lien law, and the Kansas City, Missouri earnings tax all change at State Line Road. A company that treats Kansas work as an extension of the Missouri books, or the reverse, will get the margin wrong, the tax wrong, or both. We set up the ledger so each state and each entity stands on its own, then consolidate for the owner and the bank.

The second challenge is concentration in a handful of owners. The metro's construction boom leans on a few hyperscale operators, one battery maker, and two sports franchises. A contractor with 70 percent of its backlog on those campuses has a strong year ahead and a fragile balance sheet, because a single owner's decision can pause a project after mobilization, as a pending referendum in Independence shows. We report backlog by owner and by campus, run the forecast with a scenario in which the largest one pauses, and size the overhead to survive the scenario.

The third challenge is labor and weather together. The campuses have pulled traveling electricians into the metro by the hundreds, union apprentice classes have more than doubled, and a $10 million sub will pay more for crews than it planned for the rest of the decade. Winter on the plains adds the calendar: ice and single-digit January weeks push site and exterior work into a window from March to November, while HVAC and home-services companies see their busiest service months in the same stretch. We build wage curves into the estimate review, model the seasonal cash cycle by trade, and size the line to the winter trough rather than the summer peak.

• Entity-level and state-level books for companies working both sides of State Line Road
• Backlog concentration by owner and campus measured and stress-tested in the forecast
• Missouri notice of intent at 10 days and Kansas lien filing at three months tracked from job setup
• Kansas City, Missouri earnings tax and two-state withholding coordinated with the CPA
• Wage and crew-availability curves priced into bids while the campuses absorb the trades
• Seasonal cash cycles smoothed with a line sized to the winter trough, not the summer peak
• Surety and construction-manager prequalification supported by monthly financials and a reconciled WIP