Fractional CFO & Controller Services for Miami-Fort Lauderdale Businesses

The condominium safety law that followed the Surfside collapse has turned every coastal building over 30 years old, or 25 near the water, into a construction project with a deadline. Milestone inspections, structural integrity reserve studies due by the end of 2026, and reserves that boards can no longer waive have produced a wave of restoration, roofing, and waterproofing work that will run for a decade. It pays on engineer-approved draws with retainage held to the end. A $15 million restoration contractor that takes four towers at once has just tripled its working-capital need, and the credit line has not moved.

The rest of the pattern is familiar from Homestead to Boca Raton. Receivables from a developer's general contractor stretch to 75 days while the line carries payroll. Change orders are performed in Sunny Isles and never billed from the office in Doral. The bank asks for a covenant certificate and receives a WhatsApp screenshot of the bank balance. And every construction accountant in South Florida who is any good already has an offer from a developer or a cruise line at a salary a $10 million subcontractor cannot match.

The fix is a sequence, not a hire. Assess what is actually true about cash, margin, and debt. Clean up the ledger until the numbers can be believed by a lender and a surety. Stabilize the weekly cash cycle and the monthly close. Document the process so it survives without us. Then transition it to your team. That is how a $6 million company in Pembroke Pines becomes a $25 million company without the accounting department becoming the reason it stalls in the first September that brings a named storm.

Our clients are privately held companies between roughly $3 million and $50 million in revenue, owned by the people who run them. In South Florida that means concrete restoration and waterproofing contractors on the coastal towers, general contractors on the mid-rise and tenant-improvement work from Brickell to Fort Lauderdale, electrical contractors and HVAC contractors on the airport, port, and hospital work, plumbing contractors following the builders west to Miramar and Homestead, roofing companies that live on the storm cycle, and the building-materials distributors along the Palmetto and Interstate 95 that supply all of them. We also serve real estate developers, logistics and import-export companies around Doral, home-services companies, and professional-services firms.

The situations repeat. The owner approves every check and has no forecast past next Friday. The controller left for a developer. The bank wants monthly reporting and a WIP schedule, and both are late. A surety has capped the bond line because the last WIP showed under-billings nobody could explain. A restoration contractor has $30 million of association work under contract and no idea which draws fund which payroll. A developer's lender wants a cost-to-complete report the accounting system cannot produce.

You should hire someone else if you need bookkeeping alone, tax preparation, an audit opinion, or legal advice. We work beside the people who do those things and hand them cleaner books. If your plan is to hire a full-time CFO and hope the ledger cleans itself, 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 practice that is a 13-week cash forecast updated every Monday, a bank relationship that is managed rather than endured, bid decisions made from job-margin data instead of the superintendent's confidence, and a monthly package that says where the money went and where it is going. The national fractional CFO page covers the full scope. This page is about how it works between Homestead and West Palm Beach.

South Florida lenders have financed booms, busts, and hurricanes, and they read a balance sheet with the skepticism that history earns. A restoration contractor taking on association work needs to show the bank a draw-by-draw cash curve for each building, not a backlog number. A developer needs a cost-to-complete report the lender's inspector will accept. 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, and urgency. One-time cleanup, software, and travel to South Florida are separate unless expressly included.

A controller's job is to make the numbers true and on time. Our fractional controller closes the month within 10 business days, keeps a job-cost ledger that ties to the general ledger, produces a WIP schedule a surety can read, runs receivables and payables on a calendar, and reconciles every bank, loan, and credit-card account monthly. For a restoration contractor that includes draw tracking by building, retainage by association, and lien waivers matched to payments received. For a developer it includes a cost-to-complete by project and a loan draw reconciliation the lender's inspector will sign.

In South Florida the hard part is not the work. It is keeping the person who does it. The developers, the cruise lines, the hospital systems, and the banks along Brickell Avenue all hire accountants at scale, and a $10 million contractor cannot outbid them for long. A fractional controller solves that by running the function and documenting it, so the next hire inherits a written procedure instead of a mystery. We work in QuickBooks, Sage 300 CRE, ServiceTitan, JD Edwards, and Power BI.

Controller engagements start at $2,500 per month. The scope is written down on day one 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 at the state level through the Construction Industry Licensing Board, and the license rests partly on the qualifier's personal financial standing. The Board expects a FICO-derived credit score of at least 660 and no unsatisfied judgments. A qualifier below that line may still be licensed by posting a bond or letter of credit, $20,000 for a Division I license and $10,000 for a Division II specialty trade, cut in half after the Board's 14-hour financial-responsibility course. The surety then makes its own, larger judgment from the WIP schedule and the year-end balance sheet. A construction CFO keeps the qualifier's credit and the surety file on the same calendar.

Florida's lien law is the collections department's real deadline. A subcontractor, sub-subcontractor, or supplier without a direct contract with the owner must serve a Notice to Owner within 45 days of first furnishing labor or materials, and before the owner's final payment to the contractor. A claim of lien must be recorded within 90 days of the last day of work. On an association restoration job, the owner is a condominium association and the paperwork discipline decides whether a receivable is collectible. We put the notice in job setup and the 90-day clock on the collections calendar, and your construction attorney handles any claim.

Florida sales tax treats a contractor performing a real property improvement as the consumer of the materials, paying tax to the supplier and charging the customer no tax on the finished work. The treatment changes for a contractor that also sells and installs fixtures that do not become part of the structure, and again when materials are imported or bought out of state. We do not give tax advice. We make sure the contract form, the job setup, and the supplier invoices capture what your CPA needs, and we ask the CPA before the first invoice goes out.

Trouble in South Florida tends to arrive in the same order. The line of credit is fully drawn by spring and never comes back down. Payroll taxes slip a quarter. A supply house in Medley moves you to COD. The surety asks for an updated WIP schedule and stops returning calls after reading it. By the time the bank asks for a meeting, the owner has been funding payroll from savings for months and calling 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 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 South Florida banks have workout groups that have seen every version of this and prefer borrowers who arrive 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 new. Our turnaround CFO and 13-week cash-flow forecast pages cover the mechanics.

The current cycle is split. Condominium restoration and public infrastructure are running hot while population is leaving the core, Broward's industrial pipeline has thinned to 885,000 square feet, and residential demand has cooled with the outflow. A framing contractor tied to new residential in Homestead and a restoration sub turning down association work in Hallandale Beach need the same thing: a real margin by job, a cash forecast that goes past next Friday, and the discipline to stop taking work that loses money slowly.

Association-funded restoration is a financing problem disguised as a construction problem. Each building is its own customer with its own board, engineer, lender, and special-assessment timeline, and a draw can stall for a month because a board meeting was postponed. A contractor with eight buildings under contract has eight cash curves and eight retainage balances. We build the forecast by building, model the draw lag against payroll, and set the credit line and the supplier terms to the gap. The restoration work of the next decade will make some contractors wealthy and put others out of business, and the difference will be the cash forecast, not the concrete.

Hurricane season is a line in the plan, not a footnote. A storm that closes the metro for a week stops every job, and a season with a near miss still produces material delays, insurance surcharges, and a labor market where every roofer in the state has three offers. Property, fleet, and liability insurance for a South Florida contractor have climbed faster than revenue, and a bid priced on last year's premium loses money quietly. We build a storm scenario into the 13-week forecast every June, track insurance as its own line in the labor burden, and rebid the program annually.

The metro is losing residents and gaining projects at the same time. A record net domestic outflow from Miami-Dade in 2025 sits next to a $9 billion airport program, port expansion, and a decade of condominium work. For a residential contractor, that means the customer base is thinning while costs rise, and the answer is a shift toward commercial, association, and public work that pays slower but pays. For a developer, it means a lender that wants a cost-to-complete every month and an absorption assumption it can defend. We build both.

• Association restoration work forecast by building, with draw lag, retainage, and lien waivers tracked per project
• Notice to Owner served inside 45 days and the 90-day lien clock tracked with collections
• Storm-week shutdown, recovery surge, and insurance cost built into the June cash forecast
• Developer cost-to-complete and loan draw reconciliation the lender's inspector will accept
• Real property improvement versus equipment sale and imported-material treatment captured for the CPA
• Qualifier credit, judgments, and CILB financial-responsibility requirements watched alongside the surety file
• Competition for accountants from developers, cruise lines, and banks answered with a documented, transferable process