Fractional CFO & Controller Services for Omaha Businesses

Omaha companies grow on relationships, and relationships do not produce financial statements. A $9 million electrical contractor in La Vista has worked for the same three general contractors for 15 years, wins a $5 million package on a data-center shell and a $3 million package on a hospital renovation in the same spring, and doubles its working capital need before the ground thaws. Nobody told the bank. The bookkeeper who was fine at $9 million is closing the books six weeks late, the WIP schedule is a spreadsheet the surety stopped trusting, and the owner reads cash from the bank app in the truck on Dodge Street.

The symptoms have a Midwest reserve about them. Receivables age past 60 days while the line covers payroll, and nobody calls the general contractor because that would be rude. Retainage held under Nebraska's prompt-pay rules is capped at 10 percent, then 5 percent after the job is half done, but it is still your money on someone else's balance sheet through the winter. Change orders on the hospital job were performed and never billed. The Department of Labor contractor registration renewal is on somebody's desk. Meanwhile every construction accountant in the metro who is any good has an offer from an insurer, a railroad, or an engineering firm, and the offer includes a parking spot downtown.

The fix follows a sequence. 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 to a full-time hire when the company can support one. Assess, Clean up, Stabilize, Document, Transition. It is how a $9 million sub carries $8 million of new packages without the accounting department 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 Omaha that means general contractors and mechanical subs in Papillion and Gretna, electrical contractors and low-voltage specialists on the data-center campuses in Sarpy County, HVAC contractors and plumbing contractors serving the Elkhorn and west Omaha subdivisions, site-work and paving companies working the interstate and airport programs, and the building-materials yards, precast plants, and distributors that supply them. We also work with trucking and logistics companies along I-80, ag-services and food-processing suppliers in Fremont and Blair, home-services companies, and professional-services firms.

The situations repeat. The owner still approves every check and reads cash from the bank balance. The controller retired and the replacement was a bookkeeper with a better title. 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. Revenue doubled on data-center work and the close, the billing, and the collections did not. A sale, a family transition, or a partner buyout is coming and the books would not survive diligence. Or cash is short after a long winter, 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 Omaha CPA and attorney 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, at no charge, and we will be polite about it.

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 Omaha that means a 13-week cash forecast updated every Monday, a bank relationship that is managed rather than endured, bid 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 in a market where a company earns 12 months of overhead in seven months of production.

Omaha lenders are conservative by reputation and by practice, and they read WIP schedules carefully. A contractor pricing data-center or airport work needs to know, before signing, whether it can fund 90 days of labor and material ahead of a first pay application, and what winter does to the answer. Equipment finance for a paving fleet that sits from December to March needs a replacement schedule rather than a reaction. A distributor stocking for the spring building season needs a line that peaks in April and rests in December. Those are CFO questions. We answer them with a model, a bank conversation, and a decision, usually in 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 how much the bank and surety are asking for. One-time cleanup, software, and travel to Omaha are separate unless expressly included.

A controller's job is to make the numbers true and 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 Nebraska contractor that includes retainage tracking under the prompt-pay caps, change-order billing, percentage-of-completion adjustments, and the Iowa and Nebraska withholding and registration records for a company that works on both sides of the river.

In Omaha the hard part is not the work. It is finding someone who can do it and keeping them. The insurers, the railroad, the engineering and construction giants headquartered here, and the health systems all hire from the same pool of experienced accountants, and a $10 million sub cannot outbid a Fortune 500 benefits package for long. A fractional controller solves that by running the function 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 Blair and Plattsmouth.

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-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.

Nebraska does not license general contractors statewide. It registers them. The Contractor Registration Act requires contractors and subcontractors doing business in the state to register with the Department of Labor, with the annual fee rising to $40 on August 1, 2026, and the trades are licensed locally and through state boards for electrical and plumbing work. That leaves the surety and the bank as the real gatekeepers, and both rest on the quality of your financial statements: a credible WIP schedule, consistent gross margins by job, working capital that survives the winter, and an owner who can explain the numbers. We build the package the surety and the bank want to see, and we keep it current so the spring bid season is not held up by the year-end close.

The Nebraska Construction Prompt Pay Act shapes cash on most private jobs. Retainage is limited to 10 percent or the contract rate, whichever is lower, and once a job is at least half complete, with reasonable assurances of performance, no more than 5 percent of further progress payments can be withheld. Most subs have never asked for the step-down. We ask on their behalf, in writing, at 50 percent. Lien rights carry their own clock: a construction lien must be recorded within 120 days after last furnishing, and residential work involving a protected owner has additional notice rules. We do not give legal advice. We do put the dates into the billing process so your attorney gets a call on day 90 rather than day 130.

On data-center, hospital, and airport work, a specialty sub can sit three tiers below the owner, and the cash arrives months after the labor was paid. The principal has managed mechanic's liens, claims, and litigation support coordination for multi-entity contractors, and our construction CFO work builds the notice calendar and the retainage step-down into collections rather than treating them as legal afterthoughts.

Trouble in Omaha usually arrives in February. The line of credit was fully drawn in November to carry the crew through the winter and it is still drawn. Payroll taxes slipped a quarter. Vendors moved you to COD in January. The surety asks for a year-end WIP and does not like it. By the time the bank calls, the owner has been funding the business from personal savings since Thanksgiving and calls it a bridge. None of that is fatal if someone takes control of cash in the next two weeks, and the spring season is close enough to plan around.

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 Omaha banks extend patience to 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 strong but uneven. Construction employment grew 7.2 percent over the year on data-center, airport, and downtown work, which means the subs on those programs are turning down bids while the subs on speculative office or retail are chasing them. A company that staffed up for a campus package that slips a quarter is carrying 30 extra people through a Nebraska winter. All of them need a 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 discover its best customer was never profitable, and a spreadsheet is the cheapest place to find out.

Winter is the Omaha condition. Concrete, paving, roofing, and site work stop or slow from December into March, while the office, the shop lease, the equipment notes, and the core crew keep costing money every week. A company that earns 12 months of overhead in seven months of production has to bank the difference in August, and most do not, because August is when the trucks need tires. We build a seasonal overhead reserve into the forecast, size the winter draw on the line in advance rather than in a panic, and time equipment purchases and tax payments around the production calendar. HVAC and home-services companies live the mirror image, with cash in a July wave and a January wave and thin shoulders between, and the answer is a maintenance-agreement base and a pre-season supplier line.

Two states, one metro. A company headquartered in Omaha with jobs in Council Bluffs files in Nebraska and Iowa, with different withholding, different registration, different lien statutes, and different sales tax treatment on contractor materials. None of that is our decision to make. It belongs with your CPA and attorney. Our job is to set up the entities, the ledger, and the job files so the questions have clean answers and the filings sit on a calendar someone owns. The same applies to a Council Bluffs company crossing into Sarpy County for the campus work, which is most of them.

Concentration is the third challenge, and the data-center boom has sharpened it. A handful of hyperscale owners, their construction managers, and two or three local general contractors set the terms for a large share of the metro's electrical, mechanical, and site-work capacity. A $15 million sub with half its backlog under one campus program is a healthy business until the program pauses, and Omaha banks know it. We build concentration into the forecast, size the line to the real exposure, and push for a second and third anchor customer before the first one asks for a price cut.

• Seven-month production season and 12-month overhead reconciled in the forecast
• Nebraska prompt-pay retainage caps and the 50 percent step-down requested on every job
• 120-day construction lien deadlines built into billing and collections
• Nebraska and Iowa entity, registration, and withholding calendars owned by the close
• Data-center program concentration modeled in the forecast and sized into the credit line
• Winter draws on the line planned in August rather than in December
• Competition with insurers, railroads, and engineering firms for accounting talent answered with a documented process