Fractional CFO & Controller Services for Las Vegas Businesses

A Las Vegas specialty contractor can double revenue in a year on a single resort remodel and then watch the phone go quiet for six months when the capital budget moves to the next property. A signage or millwork shop that lives on convention build-outs sees cash arrive in the weeks after the big shows and nothing in between. The bookkeeper who could keep up when the company did $3 million cannot keep up at $9 million, and the owner is making bid decisions from the bank balance because the job-cost reports are two months behind.

The symptoms repeat across the valley. Retainage from resort work sits uncollected long after the ribbon cutting. Change orders were performed on a verbal go-ahead from a project manager who has since left the property. The surety wants a WIP schedule that reconciles to the ledger and gets a spreadsheet that reconciles to nothing. The Nevada State Contractors Board monetary limit was set when the company was half its current size, and the next bid exceeds it. And the one accountant who understood all of this took a job at a resort operator with a benefits package you cannot match.

The fix follows a sequence rather than a hiring spree. 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 carry one. That is how a $5 million contractor becomes a $20 million contractor without the accounting department becoming the reason the surety says no.

Our clients are privately held companies between roughly $3 million and $50 million in revenue, owned by the people who run them. In Las Vegas that means general contractors and tenant-improvement builders working the Strip and the resort corridors, HVAC contractors and plumbing contractors running service fleets across Henderson, Summerlin, and North Las Vegas, electrical contractors on industrial work at Apex and along the I-15 corridor, concrete and framing subs tied to housing in Enterprise and the southwest valley, and the building-materials distributors that supply all of them.

We also work with the companies that serve hospitality without being hospitality: audiovisual and staging vendors, laundry and linen services, food distributors, security and staffing firms, and the home-services companies that keep 2.4 million residents cool. The situations are consistent: the owner approves every check and cannot state gross margin by job; the controller left, or was really a bookkeeper with a bigger title; the bank wants covenant reporting and a WIP schedule and both are late; the contractors board needs a financial statement to raise the monetary limit; or cash is short, the supply house has moved you to COD, and the owner needs a plan rather than reassurance.

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 will 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 Las Vegas company that means a 13-week cash forecast updated every Monday that reflects the actual resort payment cycle and the actual convention calendar, a bank relationship managed with a monthly package instead of a quarterly scramble, and bid and pricing decisions made with margin data by customer instead of by optimism. The national fractional CFO page covers the full scope. This page is about how it works in Clark County.

Las Vegas lenders have financed several boom-and-bust cycles and they underwrite accordingly. A contractor deciding whether to take a package on a ballpark, a data center at Apex, or a resort tower remodel needs to know before signing whether it can fund 90 days of labor and material ahead of the first draw, what the retainage schedule does to working capital, and whether the monetary limit on the license covers the contract. Those are CFO questions. We answer them with a model, a bank conversation, and a decision, usually inside the same week, which is faster than the resort's accounts-payable department will ever move.

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 Las Vegas 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 contractors board can read, run receivables and payables on a published calendar, and reconcile every bank, loan, and credit-card account monthly. For a Nevada contractor that includes retainage receivable by project, change-order billing with written authorization attached, and the notice calendar that preserves lien rights on every job where you are not the prime.

The hard part in Las Vegas is not the work. It is the talent market. Resort operators, gaming companies, and the large national contractors active on the Strip hire from the same pool of construction accountants, and a $10 million subcontractor in Henderson cannot outbid a casino for a controller. 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 Summerlin and Boulder City.

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.

Nevada licenses contractors through the State Contractors Board, and two features of that system shape the finance function. The first is the monetary limit, the maximum contract a licensee may take on a single site for a single client. The second is the license bond, which the board sets between $1,000 and $500,000 based on the license type, the monetary limit, and the applicant's financial responsibility. A financial statement is required regardless of the limit requested, and a higher limit calls for a stronger statement. In practice that means the quality of your balance sheet decides which jobs you are allowed to bid. We prepare the statement, the working-capital support, and the explanation the board and its reviewers expect.

Nevada lien law also has its own calendar. Subcontractors and suppliers preserve their rights by serving a notice of right to lien within a fixed window after first furnishing labor or materials, and the recording and enforcement deadlines run from completion. Public work substitutes bond claims for liens, with their own notices. None of that is legal advice, and we do not give it. What we do is put the notice calendar inside 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.

Surety capacity for project bonds is a larger question than the license bond, and it rests almost entirely on financial statements: 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 on a call. Public work in Clark County and the school district requires bonds, and the resort owners increasingly ask for them on large packages. 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. Phoenix contractors face the same surety questions with a different licensing board, and the process travels.

Trouble in Las Vegas usually announces itself after a good year. The company staffed up for a resort remodel, bought trucks for it, and carried the receivable for 120 days. The next project slipped a quarter. The line of credit is now fully drawn, payroll taxes are a month behind, and the supply house wants a check before the next delivery. The surety has asked for an updated WIP and did not like the answer. The owner has been funding payroll from savings since spring 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. 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 in Southern Nevada is a study in mixed signals. Visitation fell in 2025 while convention attendance held near six million, the metro's unemployment rate ran above 5 percent, and industrial construction slowed even as the ballpark, Brightline West preconstruction, and Apex kept large contractors busy. A tenant-improvement contractor tied to resort capital budgets is resizing while an electrical sub at Apex 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 find out its favorite customer never paid on time, and it is cheaper to find out in a spreadsheet.

Heat is a cost center with a calendar. Las Vegas recorded 77 days at or above 100 degrees in 2025, 35 fewer than 2024 and still enough to reshape every field company's summer, and the valley hit 112 degrees in July 2026. Crews start before dawn, productivity per hour falls, equipment fails in August far more often than it fails in March, and HVAC contractors earn most of the year's profit in a few summer months and then carry the payroll through a thin winter. We build seasonal labor-burden and equipment-repair curves into the forecast and, for service companies, a maintenance-agreement base and a pre-season supplier line that carry the company from October to May without a panic.

Hospitality payment cycles are the second challenge. Resort operators and convention contractors pay on their own schedules, often 60 to 90 days after invoice with retainage held to final completion, and a vendor that lives on Strip work has to fund that gap with its own working capital or a bank line sized to it. The 2025 visitation decline and the softer convention calendar in some quarters showed how quickly a good customer's capital budget can move. We model the receivable calendar by customer type, size the credit request to the slowest payer, and build the concentration risk into the forecast so a single property's delay does not become your payroll problem.

The third challenge is the license itself. A Nevada monetary limit that made sense at $4 million in revenue becomes a ceiling at $12 million, and raising it requires a financial statement the board will accept, prepared on a basis its reviewers recognize. Owners planning to bid on the larger public and resort packages need to start that process a year before the bid, not the week of it. We coordinate the statement, the working-capital support, and the timing with your CPA so the limit is raised before the opportunity arrives. Growth that outruns the license is still growth. It is just growth you cannot contract for.

• Summer heat priced into labor burden, equipment repair, and productivity assumptions for every bid
• Seasonal HVAC and home-services cash cycles smoothed with agreements and pre-season supplier credit
• Resort, gaming, and convention payment cycles modeled by customer so working capital covers the slowest payer
• Nevada monetary limit increases supported with financial statements prepared for the contractors board
• Notice-of-right-to-lien and bond-claim calendars built into billing, in coordination with counsel
• Customer concentration and capital-budget timing built into the 13-week forecast
• Construction accounting talent competition answered with a documented, transferable process