Fractional CFO & Controller Services for Pittsburgh Businesses

Pittsburgh companies do not usually fail from lack of work. They fail from the distance between a large project's cash cycle and a small company's balance sheet. An industrial or energy owner pays on its own schedule, with long approval chains, strict invoicing formats, and retention held to the end. A $7 million mechanical contractor in Canonsburg that wins a $3 million package on a plant upgrade has taken on months of labor and material before the first draw, and the bank has not been told. The bookkeeper who was fine at $3 million is closing the books six weeks late.

The symptoms are consistent. Receivables age past 60 days while the line of credit covers payroll. Change orders are performed, argued about, and never billed. The surety asks for a WIP schedule and receives a spreadsheet nobody trusts. The owner cannot say what last month earned because the job-cost ledger and the general ledger disagree by an amount that grows every quarter. Meanwhile, the accountant the company hired in 2022 has left for a hospital system, which offered a signing bonus and free parking.

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 a full-time hire when the company can support one. Assess, Clean up, Stabilize, Document, Transition. That is how a $5 million Pittsburgh subcontractor grows into a $20 million one 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 the Pittsburgh region that means general contractors in Robinson Township and Monroeville, HVAC contractors and plumbing contractors serving the North Hills and South Hills, electrical contractors on industrial, energy, and data-center work in Washington, Butler, and Indiana counties, fabricators and industrial-services companies in the Mon Valley, and the building-materials yards and distributors that supply all of them. We also work with home-services companies, professional-services firms, and manufacturers' suppliers along the rivers.

The situations repeat. The owner still approves every check and reads cash from the bank balance. The controller retired after 25 years and took the process with her. 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. A second-generation owner is taking over and discovering what the first generation kept in a drawer. Or cash is short, the vendors are calling, and the owner needs a plan rather than reassurance.

You should hire someone else if you need bookkeeping alone, tax preparation, an audit opinion, 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 the judgment of a chief financial officer for a fraction of the week and a fraction of the cost. 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 Beaver and Greensburg.

Pittsburgh lenders are conservative by habit and they read WIP schedules with care. A contractor considering a package on the Mon Valley upgrades, on a data-center build, or on the Homer City campus needs to know before signing whether it can fund the labor and material ahead of a first pay application, whether the line of credit will stretch, and what the retention will do to year-end working capital. Equipment finance for a fleet that idles through January needs a replacement schedule, not a reaction. Those are CFO questions. We answer them with a model, a bank conversation, and a decision, usually within the 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 your bank and surety are asking for. One-time cleanup, software, and travel 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 contractor that includes retention tracking, change-order billing, certified payroll support on public and prevailing-wage work, and the percentage-of-completion adjustments that turn a cash-basis guess into a real margin.

In Pittsburgh the hard part is not the work. It is finding someone who can do it and keeping them, when the health systems, the universities, and the large engineering firms all hire from the same pool of construction accountants. A $10 million contractor in Bethel Park cannot outbid them 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 Moon Township and McKeesport.

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.

Pennsylvania does not issue a statewide general contractor license. Home improvement contractors doing $5,000 or more of residential work a year register with the Office of Attorney General, and the City of Pittsburgh requires its own general contractor license for work under a commercial building permit and for one- and two-family construction. Surrounding municipalities set their own rules. That patchwork is an administrative burden and a finance problem: a lapsed registration can stop a permit, a stopped permit stops a draw, and a stopped draw is a cash event. We keep the license and registration calendar inside the finance function where someone will actually look at it.

Pennsylvania's mechanics lien law runs on a clock that favors the organized. A subcontractor must give the owner formal written notice of intent at least 30 days before filing, the claim must be filed within six months of completing the work, and an action to enforce it must be brought within two years. On projects of $1.5 million or more where the owner files a notice of commencement in the State Construction Notices Directory, a subcontractor that does not file a notice of furnishing within 45 days can lose its lien rights entirely. We do not give legal advice. We do put those dates on the billing calendar so your attorney is consulted before a deadline, not after.

Surety capacity in this market rests on financial statements the underwriter believes: 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 energy owners add their own layer of prequalification, safety, and invoicing requirements. 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 Pittsburgh usually arrives in the same order. The line of credit is fully drawn in February and never comes back down. Retention receivable grows into a number nobody says out loud. Payroll taxes slip a quarter. A supplier in Robinson Township 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 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, 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 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 fell 6.1 percent over the year to July 2026 while education and health services grew 2.8 percent, and Allegheny County has lost about 25,000 residents since 2020. A residential trade tied to a shrinking core is resizing at the same time an industrial electrical sub is turning down work in Indiana County. Both need the same thing: 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 its oldest customer was never profitable, and it is cheaper to learn that in a spreadsheet.

Winter is a working-capital line. From December through March, site work, paving, roofing, and exterior trades lose days to cold, snow, and short daylight, and the fixed costs do not pause. Crews are kept on to keep them, equipment sits, and April pay applications carry February's overhead. The right structure is a cash forecast that prices the slow quarter in advance, a seasonal line sized to the trough rather than the average, and a service base that bills through the cold. Bids made in July should carry a winter productivity assumption, and most do not.

Industrial and energy work brings a particular cash pattern. Plant owners, utilities, and data-center developers prequalify vendors, badge crews, hold retention, and pay on approval chains that run through engineering firms and lenders. A $4 million package on a plant project can require four months of financing before the first dollar arrives, and it will arrive precisely on time and never early. We model that before the bid, size the line to it, and put the notice deadlines on the same calendar as the billing dates. The alternative is discovering the financing need in month three, when the bank is least interested.

Succession is the quiet challenge in this metro. Many of the region's best trade contractors and fabricators are family businesses in their second or third generation, and the books were built by someone who is now retired. A buyer, a lender, or a successor will want three years of financial statements that reconcile, a customer concentration analysis, and a margin history by job. We build that record before it is needed, because the worst time to clean up a ledger is during diligence.

• Winter productivity loss and fixed overhead priced into bids and the cash forecast
• Municipal licensing and state HIC registration tracked inside the finance calendar
• Pennsylvania lien notice and filing deadlines built into billing rather than handled after the fact
• Industrial, energy, and data-center project cash cycles financed before the bid
• Prequalification, retention, and owner invoicing requirements built into the job setup
• Succession and sale readiness: reconciled statements, margin history, and concentration analysis
• Competition for construction accounting talent answered with a documented, transferable process