Fractional CFO & Controller Services for Memphis Businesses

Memphis companies grow by adding volume, and volume eats cash before it makes any. A $9 million distributor in Olive Branch lands a national account that doubles throughput, and the new customer wants 60-day terms, dedicated inventory, and a chargeback schedule that nobody read before signing. The bookkeeper who was fine at $9 million is closing the books six weeks late, inventory in the system does not match inventory on the floor, and the owner reads cash from the bank app. The bank finds out when the borrowing base certificate is wrong two months in a row.

The symptoms are familiar across the Mid-South. Receivables age past 60 days while the line covers payroll and fuel. Gross margin looks fine at the quote and vanishes at the invoice because freight surcharges, returns, and chargebacks were never priced. For contractors, retainage held under Tennessee's 5 percent cap is still your money on someone else's balance sheet, and lien deadlines run on three different state calendars depending on which side of the river the job sits. The controller has been almost caught up since the ice storm.

The fix follows a sequence. Assess what is actually true about cash, margin, inventory, 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. Assess, Clean up, Stabilize, Document, Transition. It is how a $9 million distributor becomes a $25 million distributor without the borrowing base becoming the reason it stalls.

Our clients are privately held companies between roughly $3 million and $50 million in revenue, on all three sides of the Memphis metro. That means distributors and third-party logistics operators in the DeSoto County parks, trucking and last-mile companies out of Marion and West Memphis, general contractors and site-work companies working the industrial pipeline in Fayette and Shelby counties, electrical contractors and mechanical subs pulled onto data-center and plant work, HVAC contractors, plumbing contractors, and home-services companies serving Germantown, Collierville, and Bartlett, and the building-materials yards, medical-device suppliers, and food processors that round out the region's mid-market.

The situations repeat. The owner still approves every check and reads cash from the bank balance. The controller left for a logistics giant with a signing bonus. The bank wants a monthly borrowing base and covenant certificate, and both are late or wrong. A surety has capped the bonding program until the financials are credible. Revenue doubled on one national account and the close, the billing, and the collections did not. A sale, a family transition, or a partner buyout is coming and the books would not survive diligence. Or cash is short, the fuel card is maxed, 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 your Memphis CPA and attorney and we stay in our lane. If your plan is to fix the problem by hiring a full-time CFO and hoping 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 Memphis that means a 13-week cash forecast updated every Monday, a borrowing base that is managed rather than reconstructed, customer-level margin that includes freight and chargebacks, 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 the customer is often 20 times your size and knows it.

Memphis lenders finance receivables and inventory for a living, and they read borrowing base certificates carefully. A distributor taking on a national account needs to know, before signing, whether the line can carry 60 days of receivables plus 45 days of dedicated inventory, and what the advance rates do to the answer. A contractor bidding plant or data-center work needs to fund 90 days of labor and material before a first pay application. A trucking company replacing a fleet needs a schedule tied to revenue per mile rather than a dealer's calendar. 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 is asking for. One-time cleanup, software, and travel to Memphis 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 inventory and job-cost ledgers that tie to the general ledger, produce a borrowing base certificate the bank can rely on and 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 distributor that includes cycle counts that mean something, landed-cost accounting, and a chargeback log. For a contractor it includes retainage tracking, change-order billing, and percentage-of-completion adjustments.

In Memphis the hard part is keeping the person who can do it. The logistics majors, the hospital systems, and the large public companies headquartered here all hire from the same pool of experienced accountants, and a $15 million distributor cannot match a corporate benefits package 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 Millington and Southaven.

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, inventory and job-cost reports, borrowing base or 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.

Tennessee licenses contractors through the Board for Licensing Contractors, and a license is required for projects of $25,000 or more, with monetary limits set by classification and by the financial statement you submit. That makes the quality of your balance sheet the ceiling on the work you can bid. A contractor whose reviewed statement shows thin working capital gets a thin limit, and the surety reads the same statement. We build the financial package the board, the surety, and the bank want to see, and we keep it current so a renewal or a limit increase does not hold up a bid.

Tennessee's Prompt Pay Act shapes cash on larger private jobs. Retainage is capped at 5 percent, and the party holding it must deposit it in a separate interest-bearing escrow account, with a $300-per-day penalty for failing to do so. Most subs have never asked whether their retainage is actually in escrow. We ask on their behalf, politely, in writing. Lien rights carry their own clocks, and a Memphis contractor working in Southaven or West Memphis is under Mississippi or Arkansas rules on that job, with different notice requirements and different licensing thresholds. We do not give legal advice. We do put the dates and the state on every job file so your attorney gets a call in time.

On plant, warehouse, and data-center work, 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 builds the notice calendar and the retainage escrow question into collections rather than treating them as legal afterthoughts.

Trouble in Memphis usually starts with a customer. A national account stretches from 45 days to 75 without asking. A chargeback program takes 4 percent off the top. A general contractor on a warehouse shell slow-pays while the developer refinances. The line is fully drawn, the fuel card is maxed, payroll taxes slip a period, and vendors move you to COD. By the time the bank calls, the owner has been funding the business from personal savings for six months and calls 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 forecast built from the actual receivables, the actual payables, and the actual payroll, not the budget. Then customer and vendor triage: who gets paid, who gets called, 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 current cycle is uneven. The industrial market is working through a wave of deliveries, so some tenants can negotiate rent down and some landlords have empty buildings, while construction employment keeps growing on plant and data-center work. A site-work contractor tied to speculative warehouses is resizing at the same time an electrical sub is turning down bids. The Ford plant's shift to a 2029 start with a smaller workforce reset expectations for every supplier that staffed up for 2026. All of them need the same thing: a real margin by customer or job, a cash forecast that goes past next Friday, and the discipline to stop taking work that loses money slowly.

Three states, one metro. A company headquartered in Shelby County with a warehouse in DeSoto County and drivers domiciled in Crittenden County files in Tennessee, Mississippi, and Arkansas, with different income and franchise tax regimes, different contractor licensing boards, and different lien statutes. Tennessee has no personal income tax on wages while its neighbors do, which changes how a family-owned company thinks about entity structure and payroll. None of that is our decision to make. It belongs with your CPA and attorney. Our job is to set up the entities, the ledger, and the job files so the questions have clean answers and the filings sit on a calendar that someone owns.

Customer power is the second challenge. Memphis distributors and carriers often serve customers 20 or 50 times their size, and those customers set the terms, the chargeback rules, and the audit rights. A $20 million logistics company with 50 percent of revenue from one shipper is a healthy business until the shipper rebids the lane. We build concentration into the forecast, size the line to the real exposure, price freight and chargebacks into customer-level margin, and push for a second and third anchor before the first one asks for a rate cut.

Weather and the river set the third. Ice storms shut the region down for days at a time, spring high water on the Mississippi changes barge and rail schedules, and summer heat pushes site crews to early starts. For a contractor that means productivity assumptions made in a February bid do not survive July. For a carrier it means a week of lost revenue with a full payroll. We build seasonal curves and a weather reserve into the forecast so a bad week is planned for rather than discovered.

• Three-state entity, licensing, and lien calendars owned by the close
• Borrowing base certificates and inventory counts the bank can rely on
• Customer-level margin that includes freight, returns, and chargebacks
• Tennessee's 5 percent retainage cap and escrow requirement checked on every job
• Concentration risk modeled in the forecast and sized into the credit line
• Ice-storm and high-water weeks reserved for in the cash forecast
• Competition for accounting talent answered with a documented, transferable process