Fractional CFO & Controller Services for Raleigh Businesses

Triangle companies rarely run out of customers. They run out of visibility. A residential HVAC contractor in Apex that did $4 million in 2023 is doing $9 million now because the subdivisions kept coming, and the owner still cannot say which of the three service lines makes money. A professional-services firm in Cary added 12 people in a year and discovered that utilization is a feeling rather than a number. A specialty subcontractor working the life-sciences campuses learned that pharmaceutical general contractors pay carefully, on their own schedule, and only against paperwork that is exactly right.

The symptoms are consistent. The monthly close lands six weeks after month end, if it lands. Receivables age past 60 days while the line of credit covers payroll. Pricing was set two years ago and labor has moved since. The general contractor's license renewal asks for working capital the balance sheet does not obviously show. A lender wants a covenant certificate, and the owner is not sure what a covenant is. Meanwhile, every experienced accountant in Wake County has offers from a pharmaceutical manufacturer, a university, and a software company with equity.

The fix is a sequence. 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 $4 million company becomes a $15 million company without the accounting department becoming the reason the growth stalls or the bank gets nervous.

Our clients are privately held companies between roughly $3 million and $50 million in revenue, run by the people who own them. In the Triangle that means general contractors building in Wake Forest and Clayton, HVAC contractors and plumbing contractors serving the subdivisions from Holly Springs to Knightdale, electrical contractors on commercial and light-industrial work along I-40 and I-540, remodelers and specialty trades in Raleigh's older neighborhoods, and the building-materials and equipment suppliers behind them.

We also work with the growth companies the region is known for: engineering and architecture firms, IT and managed-services providers, marketing agencies, medical and dental groups, staffing firms, and the distributors and light manufacturers in Garner and Morrisville that supply the campuses. The situations repeat: the owner still approves every check and reads cash from the bank app; the controller left, or was never really a controller; the bank wants monthly reporting and gets quarterly apologies; a partner buyout, an acquisition, or a sale is coming and the books would not survive diligence; or growth has consumed the cash and nobody can explain where it went.

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 we stay in our lane. If your plan is to hire a full-time CFO and hope the ledger sorts itself out, we will talk you out of it on the first call, which is the cheapest advice you will get this year.

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 Triangle company that means a 13-week cash forecast updated every Monday, a bank relationship managed with a monthly package instead of an annual scramble, pricing and hiring decisions made with margin and utilization data instead of instinct, and a board-quality monthly report for a company that does not have a board yet. The national fractional CFO page covers the full scope. This page is about how it works in Wake County.

Raleigh lenders are used to fast-growth borrowers and they underwrite growth only when the reporting proves it is profitable. A contractor deciding whether to bid a package on a biomanufacturing campus, a distribution center in Garner, or a school in Johnston County needs to know before signing whether it can fund 90 days of labor and material ahead of the first pay application and whether the job will push the company past its license tier. A services firm adding a second office in Durham needs to know what utilization has to be for the office to pay for itself. 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 what the bank and any investors are asking for. Travel to Raleigh 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 for contractors and a utilization report for services firms, run receivables and payables on a published calendar, and reconcile every bank, loan, and credit-card account monthly. For a North Carolina contractor that includes retainage tracking, change-order billing, and the working-capital presentation the licensing board will ask for at renewal.

In the Triangle the hard part is not the work. It is finding someone who can do it and keeping them. Pharmaceutical manufacturers, the universities, the state, and a deep bench of technology companies hire from the same pool of accountants, and a $10 million contractor or agency in Cary 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 Chapel Hill and Wendell.

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. 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.

North Carolina ties a general contractor's license directly to its balance sheet, which makes the finance function a licensing function. Any project of $40,000 or more requires a license from the North Carolina Licensing Board for General Contractors, and the license comes in three tiers. A limited license covers projects up to $500,000 and requires at least $17,000 in working capital or $80,000 in net worth, or a bond. An intermediate license covers projects up to $1 million and requires $75,000 in working capital or a bond. An unlimited license requires $150,000 in working capital or a bond, and the board expects a CPA to document the working capital through an agreed-upon procedures report or an audit.

That means a contractor in Wake Forest that wants to move from intermediate to unlimited needs a year-end balance sheet with the right working capital on it, prepared in a way the board's reviewers recognize, and a CPA engaged early enough to complete the report before the application. Working capital is not an accident. It is the product of collecting retainage, billing change orders, managing distributions to the owner, and timing equipment purchases so they do not land in December. We plan the balance sheet toward the tier the company needs, in coordination with your CPA, and we do not give legal advice on license matters.

North Carolina lien law adds a calendar. On larger private projects the owner designates a lien agent, and subcontractors and suppliers protect their rights by giving notice to that agent within a fixed window after first furnishing labor or materials, with separate deadlines for claims of lien and for enforcement. Public work substitutes bond claims. Our principal has managed mechanic's liens, claims, and litigation support coordination for multi-entity contractors, and we build the notice calendar into the billing process so your construction attorney is called before a deadline rather than after one. The construction CFO page covers the WIP schedule, the surety package, and the job-cost discipline in more depth.

Trouble in a growth market looks different from trouble in a slow one. The Triangle company in distress is usually still growing. It hired ahead of revenue, bought trucks or software ahead of the work, and carried a receivable from a large customer for 100 days. The line of credit is fully drawn in April and stays that way. Payroll taxes slip a quarter. The owner has been funding the gap from a home equity line since winter 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, and the actual payroll, 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 Triangle is strong on the surface and uneven underneath. Life-sciences manufacturing and data-center construction are pulling trade labor toward large projects with long payment chains, while residential work in some submarkets has slowed as rates and prices caught up with buyers. A framing contractor tied to new subdivisions is resizing at the same time an electrical sub on a campus job is turning down work. 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 discover that its largest customer was never profitable, and it is cheaper to discover that in a spreadsheet.

Speed is the first challenge. A company growing fast in Wake County needs working capital it has not earned yet, and the bank will lend against growth only when the reporting proves the growth makes money. Hiring runs ahead of revenue, pricing lags labor cost, and the owner is surprised by a tax bill on profit that never showed up in the bank account. We build a hiring plan tied to revenue triggers, a pricing review tied to actual labor burden, and a distribution policy that leaves enough cash in the company to fund the next quarter and the next license tier.

Large-project payment chains are the second. Pharmaceutical, semiconductor, and data-center owners build through national general contractors and construction managers that pay against exact paperwork on their own calendar, hold retainage to final completion, and can shift schedule with a phone call. A specialty sub in Holly Springs or Chatham County that lives on that work has to fund the gap with its own working capital or a line sized to it. We model the receivable calendar by customer, size the credit request to the slowest payer, and keep the customer concentration in front of the owner and the bank.

Weather and talent round out the list. Late-summer tropical systems can stop outdoor work for a week and flood a service company with emergency calls that arrive faster than they can be invoiced, and the humid summer reshapes productivity for anyone working outdoors. Meanwhile, the same employers that make the Triangle grow compete for every experienced accountant, estimator, and project manager. A $10 million company cannot win that contest on salary. It can win it with a documented finance function that does not depend on any one person, which is what we build. Charlotte companies face the same talent pressure with a banking-heavy twist, and the process travels between them.

• Growth financing sized to the working capital a larger backlog or headcount actually requires
• North Carolina license-tier working capital planned at the balance-sheet level with your CPA
• Lien-agent notices and claim deadlines built into billing, in coordination with counsel
• National general-contractor and campus payment cycles modeled by customer
• Utilization, pricing, and hiring triggers for professional-services firms
• Storm-season cash timing and emergency-work billing for service companies
• Construction and finance talent competition answered with a documented, transferable process