Fractional CFO & Controller Services for Sacramento Businesses

Sacramento companies rarely fail from lack of work. They fail from the distance between the work and the accounting. Total nonfarm employment in the Sacramento-Roseville-Folsom metro sat at 1,112,700 in June 2026 with unemployment at 4.8 percent, and the region's builders, trade contractors, and service businesses are still adding customers faster than they add process. An electrical contractor in Rancho Cordova doing $7 million a year that wins a $3 million package on a distribution center at Metro Air Park has doubled its working capital need overnight, and nobody has told the bank.

The symptoms are consistent. Receivables age past 60 days while the line of credit covers payroll. Retention on completed phases sits uncollected because nobody owns the follow-up. Change orders are performed and never billed. The QuickBooks file has three versions and the one the bank saw is not the one the owner uses. Meanwhile every construction accountant worth hiring between Davis and El Dorado Hills already has two offers, and one of them is from the state.

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 $4 million Sacramento contractor becomes a $15 million contractor 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 Sacramento region that means general contractors in Roseville and Rocklin, HVAC contractors and plumbing contractors serving new subdivisions in Elk Grove and Lincoln, electrical contractors on the industrial and logistics work around McClellan and Metro Air Park, homebuilders and land developers in Folsom and El Dorado Hills, and the building-materials yards and distributors that supply them. We also work with home-services companies, professional-services firms, and the specialty subs on public and institutional work who know the joy of a state pay cycle.

The situations repeat. The owner still approves every check and reads cash from the bank balance. The controller left, or was never really a controller. 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 and the close, the billing, and the collections did not. A sale, an acquisition, or a partner buyout is coming and the books would not survive diligence. Or cash is short and the vendors are calling.

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 from West Sacramento to Folsom.

Sacramento lenders have lived through the last housing cycle and they read WIP schedules carefully. A subcontractor bidding on the Railyards, on a Costco distribution building, or on the next phase of a master-planned community needs to know before signing whether it can fund 90 days of labor and material ahead of a first draw, and whether retention on the prior phase will be released in time to matter. Equipment finance for a fleet that runs hard through the dry season needs a replacement schedule, not a reaction. 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 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 California contractor that includes retention tracking by project and by phase, change-order billing, prevailing-wage payroll support on public work, and the percentage-of-completion adjustments that turn a cash-basis guess into a real margin.

In the Sacramento region the hard part is not the work. It is finding someone who can do it and keeping them, when the state, the health systems, and the large public builders all hire from the same pool of construction accountants. A $10 million contractor in Citrus Heights 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 Woodland and Rancho Cordova.

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.

California licenses contractors through the Contractors State License Board, and since January 2025 any project of $1,000 or more in combined labor and materials requires a license. Every licensee carries a $25,000 contractor license bond, and additional bonds attach to qualifying individuals and disciplinary situations. Surety capacity for project bonds is a separate and larger matter, and it rests on the quality of your financial statements: a credible WIP schedule, consistent gross margins by job, working capital that is real at year end, and an owner who can explain the numbers. We build that package and keep it current so the next bid is not held up by the last close.

The 20-day preliminary notice is the spine of California payment rights. Subcontractors, suppliers, and equipment lessors who do not serve it on the owner, the direct contractor, and the construction lender within 20 days of first furnishing generally lose lien, stop-notice, and bond rights for the earlier work. It is a legal document with a finance consequence, and it belongs on the same calendar as the first invoice. We do not give legal advice. We do make sure the notice date, the billing date, and the retention release date live in one system your attorney and your CPA can both see.

California payroll is its own discipline. Prevailing wage on public and many publicly assisted projects, certified payroll reporting, and the state's overtime and meal-period rules mean labor burden on a Sacramento job can run well above what a bid template written elsewhere assumes. Our principal has managed job costing and labor burden for multi-entity contractors and has coordinated mechanic's liens, claims, and litigation support. The employee burden calculator on this site is a starting point; the engagement puts real numbers behind it. Our construction CFO page covers the mechanics.

Trouble in Sacramento usually announces itself in the same order. The line of credit is fully drawn by spring and stays that way. Retention receivable grows into a number nobody wants to say out loud. Payroll taxes slip a quarter. A supplier in West Sacramento 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 temporary. 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 current cycle is split. Speculative industrial construction in the region has effectively stopped, with roughly 994,000 square feet under way in the second quarter of 2026, nearly all of it build-to-suit, while industrial direct vacancy held at 6.5 percent and total availability reached 10.2 percent. A sub tied to speculative warehouse work is resizing at the same time a residential trade in Folsom is turning down work. Both need 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 it is better to find out in a spreadsheet.

The Central Valley calendar shapes cash. The dry season from late spring into fall is when sitework, paving, and roofing run flat out, and the rainy months compress the schedule and the billing with it. Summer heat adds early starts and lost afternoon productivity, and wildfire smoke can shut a jobsite for days with no change order to show for it. A bid made in March should carry a seasonal productivity curve, and the cash forecast should carry the trough that follows. We build both, so the December squeeze is planned rather than discovered.

Public and institutional work is a large share of the regional economy, and it pays on its own schedule. State, county, school district, and utility projects bring certified payroll, retention held to the end, and approval chains that take exactly as long as they take. A $3 million package on a public project can require 120 days of financing before the first meaningful draw. We size the line of credit to that pattern before the bid, and we make sure the preliminary notice and the stop-notice rights are preserved as a matter of routine rather than emergency.

Growth financing is the third challenge. A trade contractor doubling with the region's master-planned communities needs working capital it has not earned yet, and lenders will finance growth only when the reporting proves it is profitable growth. That means margin by job and by phase, a backlog report the bank believes, and a forecast that shows how the next subdivision phase will be funded. Our working capital calculator gives you a first estimate. The engagement replaces the estimate with a plan.

• Dry-season productivity, heat, and wildfire-smoke shutdowns priced into bids and the cash forecast
• 20-day preliminary notices, stop notices, and retention release dates kept on the billing calendar
• CSLB license bond and surety capacity supported by credible WIP and financial statements
• Prevailing-wage and certified-payroll labor burden built into job costing
• Public-project financing sized before the bid, not after the second missed draw
• Growth working capital modeled for contractors scaling with new master-planned communities
• Competition for construction accounting talent answered with a documented, transferable process