Fractional CFO & Controller Services for New York City Businesses

New York companies do not usually fail from lack of revenue. They fail from the distance between the work and the cash. A $12 million electrical contractor in Queens with union labor, a general liability policy priced for the city, and a construction manager that pays in 75 days is financing its customers' projects with its own line of credit. A professional-services firm in Manhattan with 40 people and a Midtown lease has the same problem in a different suit: the partners bill on the 30th, the clients pay in 90 days, and the payroll and rent do not wait for either.

The symptoms are consistent across the boroughs. Receivables age past 90 days while the line covers payroll. Change orders were performed on a field directive and never priced. Retainage from a job that finished last spring is still on the balance sheet because the closeout documents were never assembled. The surety wants a WIP schedule that reconciles to the ledger and gets a spreadsheet that reconciles to a feeling. The commercial rent tax, the unincorporated business tax, and the MCTMT all show up as surprises. And every controller worth hiring already has an offer from a real estate firm, a bank, or a hospital system.

The fix is a sequence rather than a hire. Assess what is true about cash, margin, 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. That sequence is how a $5 million company becomes a $20 million company in one of the most expensive operating environments in the country without the back office becoming the reason it stalls.

Our clients are privately held companies between roughly $3 million and $50 million in revenue, owned by the people who run them. In New York that means general contractors and construction managers doing residential conversions, school work, and tenant fit-outs; mechanical, HVAC, electrical, and plumbing contractors working across Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Queens; specialty trades in facade restoration, elevators, and fire protection; and the building-materials suppliers and equipment yards in the Bronx, Staten Island, and North Jersey that serve them.

We also work with the service economy that makes up most of the city's middle market: professional-services firms, agencies, architecture and engineering practices, medical and dental groups, staffing companies, restaurant and hospitality groups, wholesale distributors, and the property-management and real estate operating companies that live on the same 90-day receivable cycle. The situations repeat: the owner still approves every check and reads cash from the bank app; the controller left, or was really a bookkeeper with a title; the bank wants a monthly package and a covenant certificate and receives neither; a sale, a partner buyout, or an investor is coming and the books would not survive diligence; or cash is short, the vendors are calling, 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 CPA and your attorney and stay in our lane. If your plan is to hire a full-time CFO at a New York salary and hope the ledger fixes itself, we will talk you out of it on the first call, at no charge, which in this city counts as a bargain.

A fractional CFO gives you the judgment of a chief financial officer for a fraction of the week and a fraction of the cost. For a New York company that means a 13-week cash forecast updated every Monday that reflects the actual requisition calendar, the actual retainage schedule, and the actual union benefit remittance dates; a bank relationship managed with a monthly package instead of an annual scramble; and pricing, bidding, and hiring decisions made with margin data by customer instead of by instinct. The national fractional CFO page covers the full scope. This page is about how it works in the city.

New York lenders and sureties have financed more than one building cycle and they underwrite accordingly. A contractor deciding whether to take a package on a Midtown conversion, a Brooklyn lab fit-out, or a School Construction Authority job needs to know before signing whether it can fund 90 days of labor and material ahead of the first requisition, and what a pay-when-paid clause and a co-op board's approval process do to that number. A services firm deciding whether to add a floor in Manhattan or a team in Jersey City needs to know what utilization has to be for the space to pay for itself. 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, urgency, and what the bank, surety, and investors are asking for. Travel to New York is scoped in the engagement letter, and one-time cleanup and software are separate unless expressly included.

A controller makes the numbers true and on time. Ours close the month within 10 business days, keep a job-cost or project ledger that ties to the general ledger, produce a WIP schedule the surety can read, run receivables and payables on a published calendar, and reconcile every bank, loan, and credit-card account monthly. For a New York contractor that includes retainage receivable by project, change-order billing with the field directive attached, certified payroll and union remittance tracking, and the lien and trust-fund calendar that keeps rights alive and obligations clear on every job.

In the city the hard part is not the work. It is finding someone who can do it, paying them what a Manhattan employer pays, and keeping them for more than 18 months. Real estate firms, banks, hospital systems, and the large construction managers all hire from the same pool of construction and project accountants. A $10 million subcontractor in Queens cannot outbid them for long. A fractional controller solves the retention problem by running the function remotely 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 Staten Island and White Plains.

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 or project reports, WIP or utilization, aging, and a cash position you can read in five minutes on the train. 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.

New York has no statewide general contractor license, which means the rules come from the city. A business doing residential improvement work in the five boroughs needs a Home Improvement Contractor license from the Department of Consumer and Worker Protection for any job over $200, and a contractor building new one-to-three-family homes registers separately with the Department of Buildings. Under Local Law 196, workers at most major sites carry a 40-hour Site Safety Training card and supervisors a 62-hour card, and a missing card is a stop-work order. Plumbers and electricians hold their own city licenses. Every one of those items has a renewal date and an insurance certificate attached, and we put them in the close checklist so compliance is a calendar rather than a crisis.

New York's Lien Law shapes cash more than most owners realize. Private-project liens are generally filed within eight months of last furnishing labor or materials, or four months on single-family residential work, and the Lien Law's trust-fund provisions treat money received on a construction project as held in trust for the people who worked on it until they are paid. That is a legal question for your construction attorney, and we do not give legal advice. What we do is build the lien calendar and the trust-fund accounting into the billing and payables process so that the requisition, the waiver, the sub payment, and the notice all move together. Our principal has managed mechanic's liens, claims, and litigation support coordination for multi-entity contractors.

Surety capacity in the city rests on financial statements a bonding company can trust: a WIP schedule that reconciles to the ledger, consistent gross margins by job, working capital that is real at year end, and an owner who can explain the numbers on a call. School Construction Authority, MTA, and agency work require bonds, and the surety's appetite is set by your last statement. A construction CFO builds the package the surety wants and keeps it current so the next bid is not held up by the last close. Philadelphia contractors work under a different set of rules with the same surety questions, and the process travels.

Trouble in New York usually arrives on a schedule. The line of credit is fully drawn in February and never comes back down. Union benefit remittances slip a month, which the fund's auditors will notice before the bank does. Payroll taxes slip a quarter. The supply house moves the account to COD. A sub files a lien on a job where you are the prime, and the owner stops paying everyone until it is cleared. By the time the bank calls, the owner has been funding payroll from a second mortgage 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, the actual payroll, and the actual remittance schedule, not the budget. Then vendor triage: who gets paid, when, and what they are told, in writing. Then a lender conversation with a plan attached, because banks extend patience to borrowers who show up with numbers and a calendar. 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 2026 cycle in the city is a rotation rather than a downturn. Residential conversions and rehabilitation are absorbing the labor that office construction and public infrastructure are releasing, and the public capital budget is expected to shrink from about $23.7 billion in 2025 to $20.9 billion in 2026. A concrete sub that lived on agency work is resizing while a mechanical contractor on residential conversions is turning down jobs. Both need the same discipline: real margin by job, a cash forecast that goes past next Friday, and the resolve to stop taking work that loses money slowly. One of them is about to learn that its biggest customer was never profitable, and it is cheaper to learn that in a spreadsheet.

Cost density is the first challenge. Labor, insurance, rent, and the tolls to get a truck below 60th Street stack up faster here than in most markets, and the margin a bid carries is thin enough that a two-week slip in a requisition can erase it. Congestion pricing added a per-entry toll for vehicles entering the Manhattan zone in January 2025, and for a service fleet that crosses the line daily it is a payroll-sized expense that belongs in the job cost, not in overhead. We build the true cost of operating in the city into pricing and into the forecast so that margin is decided at bid rather than discovered at closeout.

Payment chains are the second. A specialty sub on a Midtown conversion may sit three tiers below the owner, behind a construction manager, a lender's inspector, and a co-op or condo board that meets monthly. Public agencies pay against certified payroll and exact documentation on their own calendars. A services firm bills Fortune 500 clients whose procurement portals pay in 90 days by design. Working capital has to be sized to the slowest customer, not the average one. We model the receivable calendar by customer and size the line of credit to match, so the bank sees the need before the payroll does.

Taxes and entity structure are the third. City and state levies on business income, the unincorporated business tax, the commercial rent tax in parts of Manhattan, and the MCTMT are your CPA's territory, and we do not give tax advice. What we do is make sure the ledger, the entity structure, and the allocations produce the numbers the CPA needs to file correctly and to plan, and we get the CPA in the room before the year-end distribution rather than after it. Owners planning an exit or an investor round need two years of clean statements, and the buyers active in New York's middle market will read every line.

• City operating costs, congestion tolls, insurance, and union burden priced into bids and the forecast
• New York Lien Law deadlines and trust-fund accounting built into billing and payables, in coordination with counsel
• DCWP, DOB, and Local Law 196 compliance dates tracked inside the close checklist
• Construction-manager, agency, and enterprise procurement payment cycles modeled by customer
• Surety and bank packages built on a WIP schedule that reconciles to the general ledger
• City and state tax and entity questions coordinated with your CPA ahead of year end
• Controller and project-accountant retention answered with a documented, transferable process