Fractional CFO & Controller Services for Oklahoma City Businesses

Oklahoma City companies rarely fail from lack of work. They fail because the work arrives in waves and the accounting arrives in months. A roofing or HVAC contractor in Edmond can double its revenue in a storm quarter and end the year with less cash than it started, because the deposits went to material, the crews were paid weekly, and the carriers paid in 90 days with depreciation held back. A $6 million electrical sub that wins a package on a public project has months of certified payroll ahead of the first draw, and the bank was not told. The bookkeeper who was fine at $3 million is now closing the books six weeks late.

The symptoms look alike. Receivables age past 60 days while the line of credit covers payroll. Insurance-funded jobs sit half-collected because nobody is chasing the depreciation holdback. Change orders are performed, argued about, and never billed. The WIP schedule is a spreadsheet nobody trusts, and the surety has noticed. Meanwhile, the accountant the company hired in 2024 has left for a hospital system on the Health Sciences campus, which offered a signing bonus and a badge that opens the parking garage.

There is a sequence to the fix. Assess what is actually 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 a full-time hire when the company can support one. Assess, Clean up, Stabilize, Document, Transition. That is how a $4 million Oklahoma City contractor grows into a $15 million one without the accounting department becoming the reason it stalls.

Our clients are privately held companies of roughly $3 million to $50 million in revenue whose owners still run them. In the Oklahoma City metro that means general contractors in Edmond and Norman, HVAC contractors and plumbing contractors serving the fast-growing west side from Yukon to Mustang, electrical contractors on public, medical, and downtown work, roofing and restoration companies from Moore to Midwest City, homebuilders and site contractors in Canadian County, and the building-materials yards and distributors that supply all of them. We also work with home-services companies, oilfield-services suppliers, and professional-services firms.

The situations are familiar. The owner still approves every check and reads cash from the bank balance. Revenue doubled in a storm year and the close, the billing, and the collections did not. The bank wants monthly covenant reporting and a WIP schedule, and both are late. A surety has capped the bonding program until the financials are credible. An energy customer has cut its capital budget and the service company that depended on it needs to resize in a quarter. Or cash is short, the vendors are calling, and the owner needs a plan rather than reassurance.

You should look elsewhere if the need is bookkeeping by itself, tax preparation, an audit opinion, or legal advice. We coordinate with the people who do that work and we 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, and the call is free.

A fractional CFO is chief-financial-officer judgment bought by the week rather than by the year. 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 Guthrie and Norman.

Oklahoma City lenders have lived through more than one energy cycle and they read cash forecasts with a skeptic's eye. A contractor considering a package on the arena, on the Tinker expansion, or on a Bricktown tower 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 whether the line of credit will stretch. A restoration company deciding how many crews to add after a hail event needs the same model with insurance collection timing in it. Those are CFO questions. We answer them with a forecast, a bank conversation, and a decision, usually within the week.

A Fractional CFO starts at $3,500 per month. An Operating CFO who runs the finance function day to day starts at $8,500, CFO Advisory at $5,000, and Embedded CFO at $12,500, with interim leadership priced for the situation. Those numbers are where the conversation starts, not where it ends. The final fee reflects company size, entity count, transaction volume, the condition of the books, urgency, and what your bank and surety need to see. One-time cleanup, software, and travel are separate unless the scope includes them.

The controller makes the numbers true and gets them out 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 supplement and holdback, and the percentage-of-completion adjustments that turn a cash-basis guess into a real margin.

In Oklahoma City the hard part is not the work but the hiring, because the hospital systems, the energy companies, and the state all hire from the same pool of accountants. A $10 million contractor in Yukon cannot outbid them for long. A fractional controller solves the retention problem by making the process the asset: we run it and document it, and the next hire inherits it. We work in QuickBooks, Sage 300 CRE, ServiceTitan, JD Edwards, and Power BI, which covers most of what is installed between Piedmont and Shawnee.

Controller engagements start at $2,500 per month, with the scope written down on day one and a published close calendar. The monthly package does not vary: financial statements, job-cost reports, WIP, aging, claim-level receivables where they apply, and a cash position you can read in five minutes. When the company is ready to hire a full-time controller, the documented process goes with the job. Fix it. Run it. Document it. Hand it off.

Oklahoma does not license general contractors at the state level. It licenses the trades: electrical, mechanical, and plumbing contractors hold licenses from the Construction Industries Board under their own acts, and roofing contractors must register with the same board. Oklahoma City adds its own contractor registration for anyone pulling permits inside the city. That structure puts the credential on the person and the registration on the company, and both have renewal dates. A lapsed one stops a permit, a stopped permit stops a draw, and a stopped draw is a cash event. We keep the renewal calendar inside the finance function where someone will actually look at it.

Oklahoma's lien statute is built around a pre-lien notice that trips up the unorganized. A subcontractor or supplier with a claim over $10,000 on a commercial project, or any claim on an owner-occupied residence, must send a pre-lien notice within 75 days after last furnishing labor or materials, and the lien statement itself must be filed within 90 days of last furnishing, with a notarized affidavit that the notice was sent. Miss the notice and the lien is gone. 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 in Oklahoma City rests on statements the underwriter can believe: 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. Public owners and the base add prevailing-wage, certified-payroll, and prequalification 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.

Oklahoma City trouble has a pattern. A storm year ends and the crews hired for it are still on payroll in January. The line of credit is fully drawn and never comes back down. Payroll taxes slip a quarter. A supplier in Del City moves you to COD. The surety asks for an updated WIP and goes quiet. By the time the bank calls, the owner has been funding payroll from savings for six months and calling it a bridge loan. None of that is fatal if cash is brought under control in the next two weeks.

Step one is a 13-week cash forecast built from the actual receivables, including insurance claims by stage, the actual payables, and the actual payroll, not the budget. Step two is vendor triage: who gets paid, when, and what they hear from you. Step three is the lender, with a plan attached, because banks are patient with 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 here. Construction employment grew 2.3 percent in the year to July 2026 while mining and logging fell 1.0 percent, and the two halves of the metro's economy do not always talk to each other. An oilfield-services supplier in Midwest City is resizing at the same time a site contractor in Canadian County is turning down work. Both need real margin by job, a cash 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 the customer it has served longest never paid for the privilege, and that is cheaper to discover in a spreadsheet than in a bank meeting.

Weather is a working-capital line in both directions. Spring hail and wind create a wave of insurance-funded roofing, siding, and restoration work that arrives all at once and pays in installments: the deposit, the actual cash value, and the recoverable depreciation that comes only after the job is complete and documented. A company that grows on that work needs a receivable ledger organized by claim, a collections calendar that chases the holdback, and a forecast that treats the storm quarter as an event rather than a trend. Ice storms and summer heat cost site crews productivity on the other side of the year. We price both into the bid and the cash forecast.

Public and institutional work brings a particular cash pattern. The arena, the base, the universities, and the school districts pay on a fixed schedule, hold retainage, require certified payroll, and do not pay early. A $3 million package on a public project can require three months of financing before the first dollar arrives. We model it ahead of the bid, size the line accordingly, and put the 75-day pre-lien notice on the same calendar as the billing dates, because lien rights on private work and bond claims on public work each run on clocks that do not care whether the office was busy.

Growth on the west side is the quiet challenge. Canadian County added roughly 4,850 residents in a single year and about 33,000 since 2020, which is why a plumbing or HVAC contractor in Yukon or Mustang can double in three years without trying. Doubling revenue requires working capital the company has not yet earned, and both the surety's ratio test and the bank's covenants come down to one question: how much of the profit stayed in the business. We answer it with a distribution schedule driven by the forecast instead of the owner's tax estimate, and with a monthly package that separates profitable growth from mere growth.

• Storm-season revenue, insurance holdbacks, and crew ramp-downs modeled as events in the cash forecast
• Construction Industries Board licenses, roofing registration, and city registration tracked inside the finance calendar
• Oklahoma 75-day pre-lien notice and 90-day filing deadline built into billing rather than handled after the fact
• Public, military, and institutional project cash cycles financed before the bid
• Energy-customer concentration measured monthly and answered with a diversification plan
• Distribution policy set by forecast so west-side growth does not starve working capital
• Turnover in the accounting seat answered with a documented, transferable process