Fractional CFO & Controller Services for San Antonio Businesses

San Antonio contractors tend to grow into trouble rather than fail into it. A plumbing contractor that did $4 million on residential service and remodel work wins a package on a new elementary school in the Schertz-Cibolo district, then a second one on a distribution center off Loop 1604. Revenue doubles. So does the receivable balance, the retainage held by the general contractor, and the payroll between pay applications. The bookkeeper who was fine when every job closed in three weeks is now trying to run percentage-of-completion accounting on a spreadsheet and is, in her own words, almost caught up.

The symptoms are consistent across the metro. Receivables age past 60 days while the line of credit covers the crews. Change orders get built and never billed because nobody owns the paperwork. The general contractor holds retainage until the owner signs off on a project that is nine months from closeout. The surety asks for a WIP schedule and gets last year's tax return. And every capable construction accountant in Bexar County already has an offer from a hospital system, a military contractor, or a national homebuilder.

The fix is a sequence, not a hire. 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 is how a $4 million contractor becomes a $12 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, run by the people who own them. In San Antonio that means general contractors building schools and clinics in Comal and Guadalupe Counties, HVAC contractors running service fleets out of Leon Valley and Universal City, electrical contractors and plumbing contractors working the industrial corridor along I-35 and I-10, framers and concrete subs tied to residential growth in Boerne, Helotes, and New Braunfels, and the building-materials yards and equipment dealers that supply all of them.

We also work with home-services companies serving the northwest side and the Hill Country suburbs, professional-services firms that grew up around Joint Base San Antonio and the medical center, and distributors that need a real forecast rather than a guess. The situations repeat: the owner still signs every check and cannot tell you gross margin by job; the controller left, or was never really a controller; the bank wants covenant reporting and a WIP schedule and both are late; a partner buyout or a sale is coming and the books would not survive diligence; or cash is short and the vendors have started calling the owner's cell phone.

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. And if your plan is to hire a full-time CFO and hope the ledger fixes itself, we will talk you out of it on the first call, without charging you for the privilege.

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 San Antonio contractor that means a 13-week cash forecast updated every Monday that reflects the actual pay-application calendar and the actual retainage schedule, a bank relationship managed with a monthly package instead of an annual apology, and bid decisions made with margin data by job type rather than by memory. The national fractional CFO page covers the full scope. This page is about how it works in Bexar County.

San Antonio lenders have financed more than one building cycle along I-35 and they read WIP schedules closely. A contractor bidding on school bond work, a distribution center in Selma, or a scope on the downtown sports district needs to know before signing whether it can fund 60 to 90 days of labor and material ahead of the first pay application, and whether a pay-when-paid clause means 120. Those are CFO questions. We answer them with a model, a bank conversation, and a decision, usually inside the same week, and usually before the estimator has finished celebrating.

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 how much the bank and surety are asking for. Travel to San Antonio 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, maintain a job-cost ledger that ties to the general ledger, produce a WIP schedule the surety and the bank can read, run receivables and payables on a calendar rather than a mood, and reconcile every bank, loan, and credit-card account monthly. For a Texas contractor that includes retainage receivable by job, change-order billing, and the monthly notice calendar that keeps lien rights alive on every project where you are not the prime.

In San Antonio the hard part is not the work. It is finding someone who can do it and keeping them. The medical center, the military installations and their contractors, USAA, and the national homebuilders active in the metro all hire from the same pool of accountants, and a $10 million subcontractor cannot outbid them for long. A fractional controller solves the retention problem by running the function remotely and documenting it, so that 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 Boerne and Seguin.

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 on your phone. 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.

Texas does not license general contractors at the state level. Registration and permitting happen city by city, and San Antonio has its own rules. The trades are different: the Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation licenses electrical and air-conditioning contractors, and plumbing runs through the Texas State Board of Plumbing Examiners, which the Legislature kept in place in 2025 after a sunset review. For a growing HVAC or electrical contractor that means license holders, continuing education, and insurance certificates that have to be tracked per entity and per municipality. We build that tracking into the close checklist so a lapsed license never shows up as a stop-work order.

Texas lien law rewards discipline and punishes drift. Subcontractors and suppliers preserve their rights by sending monthly notices to the owner and the prime on deadlines tied to the month the work was performed, and a missed notice can quietly turn a collectible receivable into a negotiation. Retainage has its own notice rules. None of that is legal advice, and we do not give it. What we do is put the notice calendar inside the billing process, so the same person who issues the pay application also confirms the notice went out, and your attorney gets called before a deadline instead of after one. Our principal has managed mechanic's liens, claims, and litigation support coordination for multi-entity contractors.

Bonding capacity rests on financial statements a surety can trust: a WIP schedule that reconciles to the ledger, consistent gross margins by job, working capital that does not vanish at year end, and an owner who can explain the numbers on a call. School bond programs and public work in the metro require bonds, and the surety's appetite for your program is set by your last statement. A construction CFO builds the package the surety wants to see and keeps it current so the next bid is not held up by the last close. We also coordinate with your CPA on the Texas sales tax questions that follow lump-sum versus separated contracts, because the job setup determines what the CPA can defend.

Trouble in San Antonio usually arrives in a familiar order. The line of credit is fully drawn in March and never comes back down. Payroll taxes slip a quarter because the deposit was the only thing that could wait. The supply house moves the account to COD. The surety asks for an updated WIP and reads it more carefully than the owner did. By the time the bank calls, the owner has been funding payroll from a home equity line for six months and refers to it as 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 San Antonio is uneven. Construction employment softened in midyear while the industrial pipeline stayed active and the downtown sports district moved toward contracts. A framing contractor tied to new residential in Comal County is resizing while a mechanical sub is turning down work. Both need the same thing: 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 learn that its largest customer was never profitable, and it is cheaper to learn that in a spreadsheet.

South Texas weather shows up in the numbers twice a year. Summer heat pushes crews to early starts and split shifts from June through September, which raises labor hours per unit of work and increases equipment failures at the worst time. Winter is the opposite problem: a hard freeze in the Hill Country can stop concrete, burst pipes across the metro, and flood a plumbing or HVAC contractor with emergency calls that arrive faster than the crews can invoice them. We build seasonal labor-burden and equipment-repair curves into the forecast, and for service contractors we model the freeze-week revenue spike as cash that arrives 45 days later, not the week the phones ring.

Payment chains in this metro are long. A specialty sub on a distribution center in Schertz or a hospital expansion in the medical center may sit three tiers below the owner, behind a pay-when-paid clause and a retainage schedule that releases at final completion. Public work brings its own rhythm, with school-district and county payment cycles that run on board meetings. Working capital has to be sized to the slowest customer, not the average one. We model the receivable calendar by customer type and size the line of credit request to match, so the bank sees the need before the payroll does.

Growth financing is the third challenge. A contractor doubling revenue needs working capital it has not earned yet, and lenders in San Antonio will finance growth only when the reporting proves the growth is profitable. Equipment finance for a service fleet that runs hot for a third of the year needs a replacement schedule, not a reaction. Owners planning an exit or a partner buyout need two years of clean statements before the conversation starts. Companies in Austin and Houston face the same pressures with different customers, which is why the process travels and the local detail does not.

• Summer heat and winter freeze cycles priced into labor burden, equipment repair, and service revenue timing
• Texas monthly lien notices and retainage rules built into the pay-application process, in coordination with counsel
• Pay-when-paid and public-entity payment cycles modeled by customer so working capital is sized to the slowest payer
• TDLR and plumbing-board license tracking per entity and municipality inside the close checklist
• Surety and bank packages built on a WIP schedule that reconciles to the general ledger
• Growth financing and equipment replacement schedules sized to backlog rather than hope
• Construction accounting talent competition answered with a documented, transferable process