Fractional CFO & Controller Services for Nashville Businesses

Tennessee ties what a contractor may bid to what its financial statements show. The Board for Licensing Contractors sets a monetary limit at 10 times the lesser of working capital and net worth, and the statements behind that number must be reviewed by a CPA up to a $3 million limit and audited above it. A Murfreesboro general contractor with $180,000 of working capital has a $1.8 million limit. The first $2.5 million job requires more working capital on a clean balance sheet or, since July 2026, a surety bond of at least half the limit requested. Either way, a six-week-old bank reconciliation does not survive a CPA review.

The rest of the pattern is familiar across the region. Receivables from a general contractor stretch past 60 days while payroll leaves every Friday. Change orders are performed in Hendersonville and never billed from the office in Smyrna. The bank asks for a covenant certificate and receives a spreadsheet nobody trusts. And every construction accountant in Middle Tennessee who is any good already has an offer from a health-care company in Brentwood at a salary a $9 million subcontractor cannot match without hurting itself.

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, a surety, and a licensing board. 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 $4 million company in Lebanon becomes a $15 million company with a $15 million limit instead of a $4 million company that keeps turning down work.

Our clients are privately held companies between roughly $3 million and $50 million in revenue, owned by the people who run them. In Middle Tennessee that means general contractors on the medical office and mixed-use work in Franklin and Brentwood, electrical contractors and HVAC contractors on the distribution buildings along Interstate 24 and Interstate 840, plumbing contractors following the production builders into Spring Hill, Gallatin, and Nolensville, site and concrete contractors on the East Bank and the Interstate 65 corridor, and the building-materials yards and distributors that supply all of them. We also serve home-services companies, hospitality vendors, and health-care and professional-services firms.

The situations repeat. The owner approves every check and has no forecast past next Friday. The controller left for a hospital system. 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. Revenue doubled in two years and the close did not keep up. Or the monetary limit is capping bids and nobody has told the owner why.

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 instinct, 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 Clarksville and Murfreesboro.

Nashville lenders have watched the region absorb a decade of growth and they know which contractors financed it well. A subcontractor considering an East Bank package sized at half its annual revenue needs to know, before signing, whether it can fund 90 days of labor and material ahead of the first payment and whether the monetary limit will stretch. A home-services company preparing for a buyer needs its maintenance-agreement revenue recognized correctly before diligence finds it. 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 Tennessee 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 and a CPA reviewer can read, runs receivables and payables on a calendar, and reconciles every bank, loan, and credit-card account monthly. For a contractor that includes retainage tracking, change-order billing, and percentage-of-completion adjustments. For a distributor it includes inventory valuation and margin by line.

In Middle Tennessee the hard part is not the work. It is keeping the person who does it. The health-care companies headquartered around Nashville hire accountants by the floor, the music and hospitality businesses hire the rest, and a $10 million contractor cannot outbid either 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.

Tennessee requires a contractor license for any project of $25,000 or more, and the license carries a monetary limit that caps what the company may bid. The Board for Licensing Contractors computes that limit at 10 times the lesser of working capital and net worth as shown on financial statements a CPA has reviewed, or audited when the limit requested exceeds $3 million. Beginning July 1, 2026, a contractor may instead post a surety bond of at least 50 percent of the requested limit. A construction CFO's first job here is to protect year-end working capital, because equipment bought with cash in December can cost the company a bid in March.

Tennessee's lien law puts a recurring deadline on every subcontractor and supplier. On commercial work, a remote contractor preserves its lien rights only by serving a notice of nonpayment on the owner and the prime contractor within 90 days after the last day of each month in which it furnished labor or materials and was not paid. Miss the notice and the company can recover only retainage. A notice of lien is then due within 90 days of completion. We build the monthly notice into the billing calendar, and your construction attorney handles anything that turns into a claim.

Tennessee's tax structure is unusual and worth coordinating early. The state has no tax on wage income, but it has a franchise and excise tax on entities, a business tax on gross receipts that applies to contractors by location, and sales-tax rules under which a contractor generally pays tax on materials as the consumer. We do not give tax advice. We make sure the ledger tracks revenue by county and by job so your CPA can file correctly, and we ask the question before the first invoice goes out.

Trouble in Middle Tennessee 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 Smyrna 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 Nashville banks 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 uneven. Industrial demand is strong, with 1.8 million square feet absorbed in the second quarter of 2026, while international migration to Davidson County fell 58 percent in 2025 and the growth moved to the suburbs. A framing contractor tied to entry-level housing in Clarksville and an electrical sub turning down distribution work in Wilson County 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.

The East Bank is a decade of work with tier-one rules. The stadium opens in 2027, Oracle's first phase targets 2028, a performing-arts center follows, and the 550 acres around them will be graded, piped, paved, and built for years. The general contractors on that work are national, their subcontract terms were written for companies far larger than a $12 million electrical sub, and the compliance load is real. We model the cash curve of a package before you sign it, size the credit line to it, and put the retainage and the notice deadlines on a calendar.

Growth has moved to the counties, and the cash cycle moved with it. Rutherford, Wilson, Williamson, and Sumner are absorbing the residents Davidson is not, and a plumbing or HVAC contractor that follows the production builders into Spring Hill and Gallatin takes on draw schedules that pay by phase, not by month. We model the draw calendar against payroll before the first lot starts, and we size the supplier terms to the gap.

Weather in Middle Tennessee is a cash event twice a year. Spring storms and the tornadoes that come with them stop work for days and then produce a surge of insurance-funded repair that pays in 120 days. Winter ice closes the region for a week and sends HVAC contractors and plumbing contractors into emergency calls that arrive all at once and then vanish. A forecast that assumes the same crew hours every month is wrong in March and again in January. Somewhere in Williamson County an owner is about to discover that his busiest month was also his least profitable.

• Year-end working capital protected so the monetary limit supports next year's bids
• Notice of nonpayment served within 90 days of each unpaid month on commercial work
• East Bank and distribution-center subcontract packages modeled for cash before they are signed
• Production-builder draw schedules in Rutherford, Williamson, and Sumner counties modeled against payroll
• Business tax by county and franchise and excise tax tracked in the ledger for the CPA
• Spring storm and winter ice labor curves priced into forecasts
• Competition for accountants from health-care headquarters answered with a documented, transferable process