Fractional CFO & Controller Services for Portland Businesses

Portland companies are not short of good people or good work. They are short of margin, and the margin is being eaten by things that do not show up on a bid sheet. Layered local taxes, higher wage floors, longer permitting, and a customer base that is cautious after two soft years all take their cut before the owner sees a dollar. A $6 million remodeling contractor in Lake Oswego that priced 2026 work on 2024 assumptions is finding out in the closeout what the assumptions cost.

The symptoms are familiar. Receivables age past 60 days while the line of credit covers payroll. Job margins look fine at bid and vanish at completion because change orders were performed, discussed, and never billed. The bank asks for a covenant certificate and gets a shrug. The books are closed, sort of, by someone who has been almost caught up since March. And the tax filings for the city, the county, and Metro each arrive with their own definitions of income and their own due dates.

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. In a soft market that sequence is the difference between a company that shrinks on purpose and one that shrinks by accident.

Our clients are privately held companies between roughly $3 million and $50 million in revenue, owned by the people who run them. In the Portland metro that means general contractors in Tigard and Tualatin, HVAC contractors and plumbing contractors serving the west-side suburbs, electrical contractors on the industrial and semiconductor-adjacent work around Hillsboro, remodelers in the close-in neighborhoods, professional-services firms downtown, and the distributors and building-materials yards in Wilsonville and along the Columbia corridor. We also work with companies in Vancouver and Camas that live with two states' worth of tax and employment rules.

The situations repeat. The controller left, or was never really a controller. Revenue fell 15 percent and overhead did not. The bank wants monthly reporting and a WIP schedule, and both are late. A surety has held the bonding program flat until the financials improve. An owner is thinking about selling in three years and the books would not survive a buyer's diligence. 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, 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 Hillsboro and Troutdale.

In Portland the CFO questions have a local shape. Should a company with $5.2 million in gross receipts restructure entities or pricing in light of the Metro threshold, and what does the CPA think? Can a contractor fund 90 days of labor and material on an industrial project in the Sunset Corridor before the first draw? Should a home-services company with a thin winter carry a seasonal line, sell maintenance agreements harder, or both? Should overhead come down now or after the next quarter's numbers? We answer those with a model, a conversation with your CPA and banker, 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 or department 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 Portland company that also means keeping the income apportionment clean across the city, county, Metro, and Oregon returns so your CPA is not rebuilding the year from bank statements.

The talent problem here is different from the Sunbelt. It is not that construction accountants are scarce. It is that a $10 million company cannot keep one busy and engaged, and the good ones leave for a $60 million firm in Beaverton with a real department. 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 Camas and Wilsonville.

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.

Oregon licenses contractors through the Construction Contractors Board, and the surety bond is set by endorsement. Since January 2024 a residential general contractor carries a $25,000 bond and a commercial general contractor at level 1 carries $80,000, with specialty and level 2 endorsements in between. Those are license bonds. Project bonding capacity is a separate matter and depends on financial statements the surety believes: a WIP schedule that reconciles, consistent gross margins by job, working capital that survives year end, and an owner who can explain the numbers. We build the package and keep it current.

The public infrastructure pipeline in this metro is large and slow, which matters to anyone who subcontracts on it. The Interstate Bridge replacement is now estimated at $7.65 billion with construction not expected to begin until 2028, and the I-5 Rose Quarter project's cost has risen to $3.6 billion with its first construction phase running through late 2026. Public work pays on its own schedule, with prevailing wage, certified payroll, retention to the end, and approval chains that take as long as they take. We size the line of credit to that pattern before the bid and put the notice and billing dates on one calendar.

Oregon has no sales tax, which simplifies one thing and complicates nothing. What complicates a contractor's ledger here is the layering of city, county, and Metro business taxes on top of the state return, each with its own thresholds and apportionment. We do not give tax advice. We do make sure the job setup, the entity structure, and the ledger capture what your CPA needs to file correctly, and we get the CPA in the room before the first invoice goes out. Our construction CFO page covers the job-cost and WIP mechanics in detail.

Trouble in Portland tends to arrive slowly and then all at once. Revenue drifts down a few percent a quarter while overhead holds. The line of credit is fully drawn by the second rainy season and stays there. Payroll taxes slip a quarter. A supplier in Clackamas moves you to COD. The surety asks for an updated WIP and does not like it. By the time the bank calls, the owner has been funding the business from savings for six months and calling 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 actual receivables, actual payables, and 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 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 right-sizing conversation is the hard one, and it is the one this market requires. With industrial net absorption negative for the year to date and manufacturing employment down 4.1 percent, a contractor or supplier whose backlog has thinned needs a real margin by job, a cash forecast that goes past next Friday, and the discipline to stop taking work that loses money slowly. Cutting overhead by 10 percent in month one is less painful than cutting it by 30 percent in month nine. We help owners make that decision with numbers instead of dread.

Rain is a line item. From November through March, site work, roofing, paving, and exterior trades lose days at a time, and the fixed costs do not pause. Crews are kept to keep them, equipment sits, and spring pay applications carry winter overhead. The right structure is a cash forecast that prices the wet season in advance, a seasonal line sized to the trough rather than the average, and a service or maintenance base that bills through the winter. Bids made in July should carry a wet-season productivity curve, and most do not.

The tax stack is a cash-flow problem before it is a tax problem. Estimated payments to the city, the county, Metro, and the state come due on their own calendars, and a company crossing $5 million in gross receipts picks up a new filing it may not have budgeted. Those payments belong in the 13-week cash forecast with their real dates, not as a lump in April. We coordinate with your CPA on the positions and put the cash on the calendar. That is the part most bookkeepers miss, and it is the part the bank notices.

Cross-river operations add a second layer. A company based in Vancouver with crews in Portland, or the reverse, lives with two states' income and payroll rules, different workers' compensation systems, and apportionment questions on every job. A remodeler or electrical contractor doing $8 million across both sides can lose real money to sloppy setup. We build the job structure so the ledger separates the work cleanly, and we make sure the CPA has what they need before year end rather than after.

• Wet-season productivity loss and fixed overhead priced into bids and the cash forecast
• City, county, Metro, and state estimated payments placed in the 13-week forecast with real dates
• CCB license bonds and surety capacity supported by credible WIP and financial statements
• Public-infrastructure subcontracts financed before the bid, with retention and certified payroll tracked
• Two-state job costing and apportionment for companies working both sides of the Columbia
• Overhead right-sizing decided with margin data in a contracting market
• Documented, transferable finance process so a $10 million company can keep good accounting talent