Fractional CFO & Controller Services for Salt Lake City Businesses

Wasatch Front companies rarely fail from lack of work. They fail from the distance between the work and the accounting. An electrical contractor in Draper doing $6 million a year that wins a $4 million package on a distribution center in the northwest quadrant has just doubled its working-capital need, and nobody told the bank. The bookkeeper who was fine at $3 million is closing the books six weeks late at $9 million, the WIP schedule is a spreadsheet with a hopeful name, and the owner reads cash from the bank app in the truck.

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 closeout because change orders were performed and never billed. The preliminary notice on the State Construction Registry was filed late, or not at all, and the lien rights on a $400,000 receivable quietly shrank. The surety asks for a covenant certificate and gets a shrug. Meanwhile every controller in the valley worth hiring already has two offers, and the second is from a software company in Lehi with a climbing wall.

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 to a full-time hire when the company can support one. Assess, Clean up, Stabilize, Document, Transition. That is how a $4 million Utah contractor becomes a $20 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 Salt Lake market that means general contractors in Sandy and Murray, HVAC contractors and plumbing contractors serving new subdivisions in South Jordan, Lehi, and Layton, electrical contractors on the industrial and data-center work in the northwest quadrant and Tooele County, homebuilders and land developers in Utah County, and the building-materials yards and distributors that supply all of them. We also work with home-services companies, professional-services firms, and the specialty subs who are about to learn what an Olympic-deadline project schedule feels like.

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 in two years 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 owner needs a plan rather than a pep talk.

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. And 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 Ogden to Provo.

Utah lenders have watched this market grow for two decades and they read WIP schedules with care. A contractor deciding whether to take a package in the Power District, on a transit extension, or on the next industrial building near the airport needs to know before signing whether it can fund 90 days of labor and material ahead of a first pay application, and whether growth in three places at once will drain the line. Equipment finance for a fleet that plows in January and paves in July 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 Utah contractor that includes retention tracking, change-order billing, State Construction Registry filings tracked by project, and the percentage-of-completion adjustments that turn a cash-basis guess into a real margin.

In the Salt Lake market the hard part is not the work. It is finding someone who can do it and keeping them, when the technology companies in Lehi, the health systems, and the large public homebuilders all hire from the same pool of construction accountants. A $10 million contractor in West Valley City 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 Layton and Orem.

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.

Utah licenses contractors through the Division of Professional Licensing, with classifications by trade and financial responsibility requirements that grow with the company. 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 the package the surety and the bank want to see and keep it current so the next bid is not held up by the last close.

Utah's lien system is unusual, and it runs through a state website. Contractors, subcontractors, and suppliers preserve lien rights by filing a preliminary notice on the State Construction Registry within 20 days of starting work on a project, and lien priority for everyone on the job is set by the first notice filed rather than by the date work began. File late and the notice is effective five days after filing, which can leave the earlier work exposed. That is a legal mechanism 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 registry date, the billing date, and the retention release date live in one system your attorney and CPA can both see.

Multi-entity structures are common here, and they multiply the accounting. A contractor with an operating company, an equipment company, a real estate holding entity, and a development partnership in Utah County has four ledgers, intercompany balances that drift, and a lender who wants a combined picture. Our principal has run treasury and reporting for multi-entity construction and field-services organizations and has coordinated mechanic's liens, claims, and litigation support. Our construction CFO page covers the job-cost and WIP mechanics in detail.

Trouble in a growth market looks like success until it does not. Revenue is up 40 percent, the line of credit is fully drawn in April and stays that way, and the owner assumes the two facts are unrelated. Payroll taxes slip a quarter. A supplier in Ogden 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 growth from personal savings for six months and calling it an investment. 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 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.

Even a strong market has soft corners. Industrial vacancy in the Salt Lake market was 7.2 percent in the second quarter of 2026 with the development pipeline nearly 73 percent below its 2021 peak, which means the speculative warehouse work that carried some subs through 2022 has thinned while build-to-suit and public work grew. A sub that staffed for the old mix is resizing at the same time a sub on transit and venue work is turning down projects. 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.

Growth in three places at once is the defining challenge. A trade contractor here can be working a subdivision in Lehi, an industrial building near the airport, and a downtown venue in the same month, each with its own owner, draw schedule, and retention. Working capital does not scale with revenue on its own, and lenders will finance growth only when the reporting proves it is profitable growth. We build the forecast by project and by owner so the company can see which job is funding which, and we size the line to the backlog the company actually has, not the one it hopes for. Our working capital calculator is a starting point.

Winter is a working-capital line. Snow, cold, and inversion days slow site work, paving, and exterior trades from December through March, and the fixed costs do not pause. Crews are kept on to keep them, equipment sits, and spring pay applications carry winter overhead. HVAC and home-services companies live the mirror image: a summer wave, a heating-season spike, and thin shoulders between. The right structure is a maintenance-agreement base that smooths revenue, a supplier line sized to the pre-season buy, and a cash forecast that carries the company across the thin months without a panic.

Deadline-driven public work adds a third layer. The transit extensions, venue upgrades, and airport phases tied to 2034 will pay on public schedules, with certified payroll, retention held to the end, and approval chains that take 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 model that before the bid, and we make sure the State Construction Registry filing is a routine step in job setup rather than a scramble after the first missed payment.

• Growth working capital modeled by project and by owner, with the line sized to real backlog
• State Construction Registry preliminary notices filed as a routine step in job setup
• Winter and inversion-season productivity priced into bids and the cash forecast
• Seasonal HVAC and home-services cash cycles smoothed with agreements and pre-season credit
• Multi-entity consolidation and intercompany discipline for operating, equipment, and real estate entities
• Public and Olympic-deadline project cash cycles financed before the bid
• Competition for construction accounting talent answered with a documented, transferable process