Fractional CFO & Controller Services for New Orleans Businesses

New Orleans companies rarely fail from the storm itself. They fail from the six months after it, when the receivables are tied up in insurance claims, the crews are working on jobs that have not been funded, and the company's own property and liability premiums have renewed at a number that was not in the budget. A $6 million roofing or restoration contractor in Kenner can post its best revenue year after a hurricane and finish it with less cash than it started, because the material was paid for up front, the crews every Friday, and the carriers in stages with depreciation held to the end. A $10 million electrical sub on institutional work has months of labor ahead of the first draw.

The symptoms are the same from Kenner to Slidell. Receivables age past 60 days while the line of credit covers payroll. Insurance-funded jobs stall at the actual-cash-value payment because nobody is chasing the depreciation. Change orders are performed, argued about, and never billed. The WIP schedule is a spreadsheet nobody trusts, and the surety has noticed. Payroll taxes slip a quarter. Meanwhile, the accountant the company hired in 2022 has left for a hospital system on Canal Street, which offered a signing bonus and a parking garage above the flood line.

The fix follows the same five steps whether or not a storm is involved. Assess what is actually true about cash, margin, insurance exposure, 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 a full-time hire when the company can support one. Assess, Clean up, Stabilize, Document, Transition. That is how a $4 million New Orleans contractor grows into a $15 million one without the accounting department becoming the reason it stalls.

We serve privately held companies between roughly $3 million and $50 million in revenue, owned and run by the same people. In the New Orleans region that means general contractors in Metairie and on the Northshore, HVAC contractors and plumbing contractors serving Jefferson and St. Tammany parishes, electrical contractors on hospital, port, and industrial work from Chalmette to LaPlace, marine and industrial-services companies in Belle Chasse and Houma, roofing and restoration companies across the metro, and the building-materials yards and distributors that supply all of them. We also work with home-services companies, hospitality suppliers, and professional-services firms.

The situations come in a few shapes. The owner still approves every check and reads cash from the bank balance. A hurricane year doubled revenue and the office is still closing the month it happened. The bank wants monthly covenant reporting and a WIP schedule, and both are late. The property insurer non-renewed and the replacement quote is double. A surety has capped the bonding program until the financials are credible. Vendors are calling, payroll taxes are behind, and the owner needs a real plan rather than another loan from a relative. Or a lender has mentioned the word workout, and the owner needs someone who has been in that room.

You should hire someone else if you need bookkeeping alone, tax preparation, an audit opinion, insurance brokerage, or legal advice. We coordinate with the people who do those things and stay in our lane. If your plan is to hire a full-time CFO and hope the books fix themselves, we will talk you out of it on the first call, at no charge.

A fractional CFO gives you a chief financial officer's judgment for a fraction of the week and a fraction of the cost, which in a turnaround is often the only affordable kind. In practice that means a 13-week cash forecast updated every Monday, a bank relationship that is managed rather than endured, bid and pricing decisions made with margin data instead of instinct, and a monthly package that tells you where the money went and where it is going. The national overview of our fractional CFO service covers the full scope. This page is about how it works between Covington and Houma.

New Orleans lenders have seen every kind of weather and they read cash forecasts for what happens in September. A contractor considering a package at the airport, on an LNG-related industrial job, or on a hospital expansion needs to know before signing whether it can fund the labor and material ahead of a first pay application, what retainage will do to year-end working capital, and what a two-week storm shutdown does to the whole plan. A company deciding whether to send crews to the Richland Parish campus needs the same model with per-diem and travel in it. Those are CFO questions. We answer them with a forecast, a bank conversation, and a decision, usually within the week.

Fractional CFO engagements start at $3,500 per month and Operating CFO engagements, where we own the finance function day to day, at $8,500. CFO Advisory starts at $5,000, Embedded CFO at $12,500, and interim leadership is scoped to the situation, which in a turnaround is often the right structure. Those are starting points, not quotes. The final fee reflects company size, entity count, transaction volume, the condition of the books, urgency, and what your lender, surety, and insurer are asking for. Cleanup, software, and travel are separate unless expressly included.

A controller has one job: numbers that are true, 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, change-order billing, certified payroll support on public work, insurance-claim receivables tracked by claim and holdback, and the percentage-of-completion adjustments that turn a cash-basis guess into a real margin.

In New Orleans the hard part is not the work. It is the hiring, when the hospital systems, the port, the universities, and the energy companies all draw from the same pool of accountants, and when the pool itself is shrinking with the population. A $10 million contractor in Gretna cannot outbid them for long. A fractional controller removes the dependency: we run the function, document it, and leave the next hire 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 Slidell and Marrero.

Controller engagements start at $2,500 per month. Scope is written on day one, the close calendar is published, and the deliverables repeat every month: financial statements, job-cost reports, WIP, aging, insurance-claim receivables, and a cash position you can read in five minutes. When the company is ready for a full-time controller, the documented process transfers with the job. Fix it. Run it. Document it. Hand it off.

Louisiana licenses contractors by the size of the job, and the thresholds are low enough that most of our clients cross all of them. A commercial license is required for commercial projects of $50,000 or more including labor and materials. A residential license is required for residential construction above $75,000, and home improvement work between $7,500 and $75,000 requires a home improvement registration. The State Licensing Board for Contractors reviews financial statements as part of licensure, which means the balance sheet is a credential. A lapsed license stops a bid, a stopped bid stops a backlog, and a stopped backlog is a cash event six months later. We keep the renewal calendar inside the finance function where someone will actually look at it.

The Private Works Act runs on clocks that depend on paperwork the subcontractor did not file. If the owner recorded a notice of contract, a subcontractor's statement of claim is due within 30 days of a notice of termination, or within six months of substantial completion if none is filed. If no notice of contract was recorded, the window is 60 days. Suppliers to subcontractors carry a separate 75-day notice-of-nonpayment obligation. The first question on every job is therefore whether a notice of contract exists, and the answer belongs in the job file on day one. We do not give legal advice. We put those dates on the billing calendar so your attorney is consulted before a deadline, not after.

Surety capacity along the Gulf rests on financial statements the underwriter believes even after a storm: a WIP schedule that reconciles, consistent gross margins by job, working capital that does not vanish at year end, and an owner who can explain the numbers without a translator. Industrial and LNG owners add prequalification, safety, and invoicing requirements of their own. Our principal has managed mechanic's liens, claims, and litigation support coordination for multi-entity contractors and has built the lender and surety package that keeps the next bid from waiting on the last close. Our construction CFO page covers the mechanics.

Trouble in New Orleans usually arrives in the same order, and it arrives more often than in most metros. The storm work ends and the crews hired for it are still on the payroll at Mardi Gras. The insurance renewal lands at a number the budget never contemplated. The line of credit is fully drawn and stays there. Payroll taxes slip a quarter. A supplier on Airline Highway moves you to COD. By the time the bank calls, the owner has been funding payroll from savings for six months. None of that is fatal if cash comes under control 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. Then a lender conversation with a plan attached, because banks extend patience to 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 if the situation calls for a formal restructuring, the reporting, the cash collateral budget, and the creditor conversations will not be new. Our turnaround CFO and 13-week cash-flow forecast pages cover the mechanics.

The current cycle is uneven here. Construction employment grew 10.0 percent in the year to July 2026 while leisure and hospitality was flat and the population kept declining. A hospitality supplier in the Warehouse District is resizing at the same time an industrial electrical sub in Belle Chasse is turning down work. Both need the same thing: real margin by job or by customer, a forecast that goes past next Friday, and the discipline to stop taking work that loses money slowly. One of them is about to learn that its oldest customer was never profitable, and a spreadsheet is a gentler teacher than a lender.

Hurricane season is a working-capital line from June through November. Even a below-normal season, which is what the federal outlook called for in 2026, means at least one week when crews go home, jobs stop, material sits in a yard that may flood, and the fixed costs do not pause. The right structure is a cash forecast that carries a storm reserve as a line item, a line of credit sized to a two-week shutdown rather than to a normal month, a receivable ledger organized by claim for the work that follows, and a collections calendar that chases depreciation holdbacks. Bids made in March should carry a September productivity assumption, and most do not.

Insurance is the second line. Louisiana's property market has begun to settle, with homeowners rate filings essentially flat in 2026 after double-digit increases in 2022 and 2023, and a private carrier has offered to assume the roughly 5,100 commercial policies held by the state's insurer of last resort at 15 to 40 percent lower premiums. But a contractor's own coverage, from property to fleet to builder's risk, still renews at prices that can swing a year's margin. We put insurance in the forecast as a scheduled cash event, model the renewal scenarios with your broker, and price the cost into every bid instead of absorbing it.

Population is the quiet challenge. The metro has lost 3.6 percent of its residents since 2020, and St. Tammany has grown while Orleans and Jefferson have shrunk. For a contractor that means the customer base is moving to the Northshore, the labor pool is thinner, and the big projects, from Richland Parish to Plaquemines, are pulling crews away with per diems. We measure concentration by customer and by parish, price labor honestly with a burden model that includes travel, and build a growth plan that follows the customers rather than waiting for them to come back.

• Storm-season shutdowns, storm reserves, and insurance-funded receivables modeled as events in the cash forecast
• State licensing thresholds and financial-statement requirements managed on the balance sheet
• Private Works Act notice-of-contract status, 30-day, 60-day, and 75-day windows built into billing
• Industrial, LNG, port, and institutional project cash cycles financed before the bid
• Insurance renewals modeled as scheduled cash events and priced into every bid
• Customer and parish concentration measured monthly and answered with a growth plan
• Competition for a shrinking pool of accounting talent answered with a documented, transferable process