Fractional CFO & Controller Services for Richmond Businesses

Richmond companies rarely fail from lack of work. They fail from the distance between a national owner's payment process and a local company's balance sheet. The developers, manufacturers, and logistics operators building along Interstate 95 and Route 288 bring their own construction managers, their own invoicing systems, and their own retainage terms. A $7 million electrical contractor in Mechanicsville that wins a $2.5 million package on a distribution center 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 now closing the books six weeks late.

The symptoms rhyme from company to company. Receivables age past 60 days while the line of credit covers payroll. Change orders are performed, argued about, and never billed. A pay application is rejected for a paperwork error and the resubmission resets the clock. The surety asks for a WIP schedule and receives a spreadsheet nobody trusts. Meanwhile, the accountant the company hired in 2023 has left for a bank in the West End, which offered a signing bonus and a parking deck.

The fix is the same sequence every time. 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 Richmond subcontractor grows into a $20 million one without the accounting department becoming the reason it stalls.

Our clients are owner-operated private companies with revenue between roughly $3 million and $50 million. In the Richmond region that means general contractors in Henrico and Chesterfield, HVAC contractors and plumbing contractors serving the West End and the Southside, electrical contractors on industrial, data-center, and logistics work from Ashland to Hopewell, site and concrete subs on the Route 288 corridor, and the building-materials yards and distributors that supply all of them. We also work with home-services companies, professional-services firms, and the manufacturers' suppliers along the James.

The calls sound alike. The owner still approves every check and reads cash from the bank balance. The company outgrew its Class B license and the Class A application needs financial statements the bookkeeper cannot produce. 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.

We are the wrong hire if you need bookkeeping alone, tax preparation, an attest opinion, or legal advice; we coordinate with those professionals and stay in our lane. We are also the wrong hire if your plan is to bring on a full-time CFO and hope the books fix themselves, and we will say so on the first call, at no charge.

A fractional CFO delivers the judgment of a chief financial officer on a schedule and at a cost a growing company can carry. 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 Goochland and Petersburg.

Richmond lenders are relationship banks by tradition and they read WIP schedules with care. A contractor considering a package at Meadowville, on a Chesterfield data-center site, or on a speculative warehouse in Hanover County 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 retainage will do to year-end working capital. A distributor deciding whether to open a second yard in Colonial Heights needs the same model with inventory turns in it. Those are CFO questions. We answer them with a model, a bank conversation, and a decision, usually within the week.

The starting point for a Fractional CFO is $3,500 per month; for an Operating CFO who owns the finance function day to day it is $8,500. CFO Advisory starts at $5,000 and Embedded CFO at $12,500, and interim leadership is custom. A starting point is not a quote. Final pricing reflects company size, entity count, transaction volume, how the books look on day one, urgency, and what your lender and surety are asking for. Cleanup projects, software, and travel are separate unless expressly included in the scope.

A controller's whole job is true numbers, delivered 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, lien-waiver management on every pay application, certified payroll support on public work, and the percentage-of-completion adjustments that turn a cash-basis guess into a real margin.

In Richmond the work is not the hard part. Keeping the person who does it is, when the banks, the insurers, the health systems, and the state all hire from the same pool of accountants. A $10 million contractor in Midlothian cannot outbid them for long. A fractional controller is the workaround. We run the function and document it, so whoever comes next inherits a process, not a mystery. We work in QuickBooks, Sage 300 CRE, ServiceTitan, JD Edwards, and Power BI, which covers most of what is installed between Short Pump and Chester.

Controller engagements begin at $2,500 per month. The scope is written on day one, the close calendar is published, and every month delivers the same package: financial statements, job-cost reports, WIP, aging, and a cash position that takes five minutes to read. When the company can support a full-time controller, the documented process is handed over with the job. Fix it. Run it. Document it. Hand it off.

Virginia licenses contractors by the size of the work, and the class you hold is a ceiling on the company. Class C covers projects from $1,000 to $10,000. Class B covers single projects up to $120,000 and $750,000 in any 12-month period, and requires a net worth of at least $15,000. Class A covers projects of any size and requires a net worth of at least $45,000, or a $50,000 surety bond in place of the showing. The net-worth test is where growing companies stumble: a contractor that distributed every dollar of profit to pay the owner's taxes may not qualify for the license its backlog requires. We build the balance sheet with the license threshold in mind, and we keep the renewal calendar inside the finance function.

Virginia's mechanic's lien law is unusually strict, and the strictness lands on cash. A memorandum of lien must be recorded within 90 days from the last day of the month in which the claimant last furnished labor or materials, and it may not include amounts for work performed more than 150 days before that last day. Include a stale invoice and the entire lien can fail, not just the excess. The memorandum must also be sworn. We do not give legal advice. We put the 90-day and 150-day windows on the billing calendar, job by job, so your attorney is consulted before a deadline, not after.

In this market surety capacity follows the financial statements, and the underwriter has to believe them: 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. National owners and their construction managers add prequalification, badging, and lien-waiver 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.

Trouble in Richmond follows a familiar order. The line of credit is fully drawn in March and never comes back down. Retainage receivable grows into a number nobody says out loud. Payroll taxes slip a quarter. A supplier in Ashland 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, provided someone takes control of cash inside two weeks.

We begin with a 13-week cash forecast assembled from the real receivables, the real payables, and the real payroll rather than the budget. Vendor triage follows: who is paid, when, and what each one is told. Then the bank, with a plan in hand, because lenders 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 none of it will be new. Our turnaround CFO and 13-week cash-flow forecast pages explain the mechanics.

The current cycle is uneven here. Construction employment fell 2.3 percent and professional services fell 1.9 percent in the year to July 2026, even as industrial deliveries in the first half of the year were four times the prior year's pace. A residential trade tied to slowing home sales is resizing at the same time a site contractor in Chesterfield is turning down work. Both need the same things: margin by job that is real, a forecast that reaches past next Friday, and the nerve to stop taking work that loses money slowly. One of them is about to find out its oldest customer never made it a dollar, and the spreadsheet is the kindest place to learn it.

Industrial and data-center work brings a particular cash pattern to a metro that did not used to see much of it. National developers, logistics operators, and hyperscale owners prequalify vendors, hold retainage, require conditional and unconditional lien waivers with every draw, and pay on approval chains that run through construction managers and lenders. A $4 million package at Meadowville or on a Route 288 warehouse can require four months of financing before the first dollar arrives, and it arrives on the schedule the owner wrote, never sooner. We run that model before the bid goes in, size the line to it, and place the Virginia lien windows on the same calendar as the billing dates.

Growth itself is the second challenge. Chesterfield and Henrico are adding residents faster than the trades can add crews, and a company doubling revenue needs working capital it has not earned yet. The Class A net-worth test, the surety's working-capital ratio, and the bank's covenant package all ask the same question in different words: did you keep enough of the profit in the company. The answer is a distribution policy set by a forecast rather than by the owner's tax bill, and a monthly package that shows the lender the company is growing profitably instead of just growing.

Summer is the third. Central Virginia's heat and humidity are not Phoenix, but July and August still cost a site or roofing crew productivity, and afternoon storms take days off the schedule that the bid assumed were there. Winter is milder than in Pittsburgh or Milwaukee and shorter, which is a reason the region attracts work, but ice storms and a wet spring can still push a February draw into April. We build seasonal productivity and weather curves into the forecast so the margin squeeze is planned rather than discovered, and so the line of credit is sized to the wet quarter rather than to the average.

• National-owner invoicing, lien-waiver, and retainage requirements built into the job setup
• Virginia Class A, B, and C thresholds and the net-worth test managed on the balance sheet
• Virginia 90-day filing and 150-day inclusion rules built into billing rather than handled after the fact
• Industrial, data-center, and logistics project cash cycles financed before the bid
• Distribution policy set by forecast so growth does not starve working capital
• Seasonal weather and productivity curves priced into bids and the cash forecast
• A tight market for construction accountants answered with a documented, transferable process