Fractional CFO & Controller Services for Louisville Businesses

Louisville companies rarely blow up. They drift. A specialty contractor in Jeffersontown grows from $4 million to $11 million over five years on repeat work from the same three general contractors, and the accounting stays exactly where it was at $4 million: one bookkeeper, one QuickBooks file, and an owner who reads cash from the bank app. Nobody notices the drift until the line of credit is fully drawn in April and the bank asks for a WIP schedule. The company has never produced one. The 2026 forecast from IU Southeast expects metro payroll gains under 10,000 jobs and unemployment drifting toward 5 percent, which is exactly the kind of slow year that exposes weak reporting.

The symptoms in the river city look the same as anywhere, with local accents. Receivables age because a tier-one contractor on a plant retool pays on the automaker's calendar, not yours. Retainage under the Kentucky Fairness in Construction Act is capped at 10 percent until a job is half done and 5 percent after that, but it is still your money sitting on someone else's balance sheet. Distributors serving the Ford and GE supply chains carry inventory bought on 30-day terms against customers who pay in 60. The bookkeeper has been almost caught up since the Derby.

The fix follows a sequence we use everywhere: Assess, Clean up, Stabilize, Document, Transition. Assess what is actually true about cash, margin, and debt. Clean up the ledger so it can be trusted. Stabilize the weekly cash cycle and the monthly close. Document the process so it survives without us. Then hand it to your team or to a full-time controller when the company can support one. Fix it. Run it. Document it. Hand it off.

Our clients are privately held companies between roughly $3 million and $50 million in revenue, on both sides of the Ohio River. In practice that means general contractors and mechanical subs working the industrial parks along I-65 in Bullitt County, electrical contractors and plumbing contractors serving the hospital and distribution buildout, HVAC contractors and home-services companies covering the East End and Oldham County, and the fabricators, building-materials yards, and distributors that feed the automotive and appliance plants. We also work with professional-services firms, bourbon-adjacent manufacturers and packaging suppliers, and logistics companies clustered around Worldport and the River Ridge park across the bridge in Jeffersonville.

The situations repeat. The controller retired and the replacement turned out to be a bookkeeper with a better title. The bank wants monthly covenant reporting and a WIP schedule, and both are late. A tier-one contractor has offered a larger package than the company has ever carried and the owner is not sure the balance sheet can fund it. Revenue doubled and the close, the billing, and the collections did not. A sale, an ESOP conversation, or a second-generation transition is coming and the books would not survive a quality-of-earnings review. Or cash is short 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 Louisville CPA and attorney and we stay in our lane. We will also tell you on the first call if what you need is a staff accountant rather than a fractional CFO, and we will not charge you for the opinion.

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 Louisville that usually means a 13-week cash forecast updated every Monday, a bank relationship that is managed rather than endured, bid and pricing decisions made from job-margin data rather than instinct, and a monthly package that tells you where the money went and where it is going. The national description of our fractional CFO service covers the full scope. This page is about how it works in a market where most of the money comes from a few large customers.

Louisville lenders have watched the automotive and appliance cycles for decades and they read concentration risk carefully. A contractor with 40 percent of backlog tied to one plant program needs a working capital plan that survives a program delay, and the bank will want to see it before the line renews. Equipment finance for a fleet that idles in January needs a replacement schedule rather than a reaction. Distributors financing inventory for the 2027 product launches at Appliance Park need to know now whether the terms work. 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, urgency, and what your bank and surety are asking for. One-time cleanup, software, and travel to Louisville 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 contractor that includes retainage tracking under Kentucky's two-stage cap, change-order billing, and the percentage-of-completion adjustments that turn a cash-basis guess into a real margin. For a distributor it includes inventory costing that matches what is actually on the shelf in Okolona.

In Louisville the hard part is hiring. The hospital systems, the two large manufacturers, and the logistics operators all draw from the same pool of experienced accountants, and a $10 million contractor cannot outbid a health system 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 Shively and Prospect.

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. Most clients keep us for the CFO work after that and let the new hire run the close.

Kentucky licenses the trades, not the general contractor. The Department of Housing, Buildings and Construction issues state licenses for HVAC contractors, electrical contractors, and plumbing contractors, while general contractor licensing is handled locally, including by Louisville Metro. For finance that means two things. Your master-license holder is a key-person risk that belongs in the succession plan, and your local registrations, insurance certificates, and bond renewals sit on a calendar that nobody owns until someone does. We build that calendar into the close. Surety capacity for bonded work rests on a credible WIP schedule, consistent gross margins by job, and working capital that does not evaporate at year end, and we build the package the surety wants to see.

The Kentucky Fairness in Construction Act shapes cash for every contractor in the state. Retainage is capped at 10 percent of undisputed payments until the project is 50 percent complete and 5 percent afterward, and the act carries prompt-payment provisions that most subs have never enforced. Lien rights carry their own clock: notice to the owner within 75 days of last furnishing on owner-occupied residential work and within 120 days for most larger commercial claims. We do not give legal advice. We do put those dates into the billing process so your attorney gets a call on day 60 rather than day 130.

On plant retools and distribution-center jobs, a specialty sub can sit three tiers below the owner, and the cash arrives months after the labor was paid. The principal has managed mechanic's liens, claims, and litigation support coordination for multi-entity contractors, and our construction CFO work treats the notice calendar as part of collections rather than a legal afterthought. A sub that knows its lien deadline tends to get paid before it.

Trouble in Louisville usually arrives on a program schedule. A plant retool slips a quarter, a distribution tenant delays its move-in, and the sub who staffed up for both is now carrying 30 extra people against receivables that have not been approved. The line is fully drawn. Payroll taxes slip a period. Vendors move you to COD. The surety asks for an updated WIP and does not like what it sees. 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 Louisville 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 cycle here is uneven. Construction added roughly 2,000 metro jobs in 2025 on the strength of the automotive, appliance, and Southern Indiana data-center work, then softened into 2026. Transportation and warehousing shed jobs even as logistics square footage kept coming online. A framing or concrete sub tied to that 2025 surge is resizing at the same time an electrical contractor on plant work is turning down bids. Both need a real margin by job, a cash forecast that goes past next Friday, and the discipline to stop taking work that loses money slowly.

Customer concentration is the Louisville condition. Two automakers, one appliance maker, one package carrier, and a handful of health systems and general contractors set the payment terms for a large share of the metro's subcontractors and suppliers. A $15 million fabricator with 60 percent of revenue from one plant program is a healthy business until the program moves, and the bank knows it. We build concentration into the forecast, size the line to the real exposure, and push for a second and third anchor customer before the first one asks for a price cut.

Seasonality follows the river. Winter freezes slow site work and pour schedules across Kentuckiana, spring floods along the Ohio can push access and delivery dates, and the summer construction season compresses a year's revenue into seven months for many trades. HVAC contractors and home-services companies see demand and cash arrive in two waves, June through August and December through February, with thin shoulders in between. The right structure is a maintenance-agreement base that smooths revenue, a supplier line sized to the pre-season buy, and a cash forecast that carries the company through April without a panic.

Cross-border operations add a second layer. A Louisville contractor working in Jeffersonville or New Albany deals with Indiana registration, Indiana withholding, and a different lien statute, and a Southern Indiana company working in Jefferson County meets the local Louisville Metro contractor rules and Kentucky's trade licensing. None of that is hard. All of it is a calendar and a set of entity questions that belong with your CPA and attorney, and we make sure the ledger is set up so the answers are easy to find.

• Customer concentration modeled in the forecast and sized into the credit line
• Kentucky retainage caps and lien notice deadlines built into billing and collections
• River-city seasonality smoothed with maintenance agreements and pre-season credit
• Kentucky and Indiana entity, registration, and licensing calendars owned by the close
• Master-license key-person risk addressed in succession and surety planning
• Growth financing sized to the working capital a larger plant package actually requires
• Competition for accounting talent answered with a documented, transferable process