Fractional CFO & Controller Services for San Diego Businesses

San Diego contractors and service companies rarely fail from lack of demand. They fail from the distance between the field and the ledger. A mechanical contractor doing $8 million a year that wins a $3 million package on a life-sciences building in Sorrento Valley has just increased its working-capital need by half, and the bank does not know. The bookkeeper who was adequate at $4 million is now closing the books seven weeks late. The WIP schedule is a spreadsheet the estimator updates when the surety asks. The owner reads cash from the bank app and calls it a forecast.

The symptoms are familiar across the county. Receivables age past 60 days while the line covers payroll. Job margins look fine at bid and disappear at closeout because change orders were performed and never billed. Certified payroll on a federal job takes an office person two days a week that nobody budgeted. The lender asks for a covenant certificate and receives a shrug. Meanwhile every construction accountant in the county already has an offer from a biotech company or a defense prime with a better parking spot.

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. That sequence, Assess, Clean up, Stabilize, Document, Transition, is how a $4 million contractor in El Cajon 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 San Diego that means general contractors in Escondido and San Marcos building multifamily and infill, HVAC contractors running fleets out of Vista and Oceanside, electrical and plumbing subs working life-sciences fit-outs in Sorrento Valley and Torrey Pines, specialty contractors on Navy and Marine Corps installations from Point Loma to Camp Pendleton, home-services companies serving the North County suburbs, and the building-materials yards and distributors that supply all of them.

The situations repeat. The owner still signs every check. The controller left, or was a bookkeeper with a bigger title. The bank wants monthly covenant reporting and a WIP schedule, and both are late. A surety has frozen the program until the financial statements are credible. A federal prime wants a subcontractor with a real accounting system and an audit trail. Revenue doubled since 2022 and the close, the billing, and the collections did not. Or cash is short, vendors are calling, and the owner needs a plan rather than reassurance.

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 we stay in our lane. And if your plan is to hire a full-time CFO at a San Diego salary to fix books that a good controller could fix in a quarter, we will say so 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-flow 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 Oceanside and the border.

San Diego lenders have watched a lot of contractors grow into trouble, and they read WIP schedules carefully. A fleet that runs year-round in this climate still needs a replacement schedule, not a reaction. A contractor deciding whether to pursue Midway Rising subcontract packages, Pure Water follow-on work, or a Navy housing contract needs to know, before signing, whether it can fund 60 to 90 days of labor and material ahead of a first pay application. Those are CFO questions. We answer them with a model, a bank conversation, and a decision, usually in the same week.

Fractional CFO engagements start at $3,500 per month. CFO Advisory starts at $5,000, Operating CFO at $8,500, 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. Travel to San Diego is scoped in the engagement letter, and one-time cleanup and software 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 contractor that includes retainage tracking, change-order billing, certified payroll reconciliation on public and federal work, and the percentage-of-completion adjustments that turn a cash-basis guess into a real margin.

The hard part in San Diego is not the work. It is finding someone who can do it and keeping them, when the biotech corridor, the defense primes, and the hospital systems hire from the same pool of accountants and pay from a different budget. A fractional controller runs the function and documents it, so the next hire inherits a close calendar and a process instead of a shoebox. We work in QuickBooks, Sage 300 CRE, ServiceTitan, JD Edwards, and Power BI, which covers most of what is installed between Carlsbad and National City.

Controller engagements start at $2,500 per month. The scope is written 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 every active license carries a $25,000 contractor's bond. That bond satisfies the state. It does nothing for your bonding capacity, which is decided by a surety on the strength of your financial statements: a WIP schedule that reconciles to the ledger, gross margins by job that hold from estimate to closeout, working capital that is real, and an owner who can explain the numbers. We build that package and keep it current so a bid on a school, a hospital, or a Navy project is not held up by a stale close.

California's payment protections turn on a 20-day preliminary notice. A subcontractor or supplier who may need lien or stop-notice rights on a private job generally serves the notice within 20 days of first furnishing labor or materials, and late notice protects only recent work. On public work the mechanism is a stop-payment notice and a payment bond claim rather than a lien, and federal work runs on its own rules. We build the notice calendar into job setup and track retainage and release dates by job. Whether to enforce a right is your attorney's decision. Keeping the right alive is part of our billing process.

Federal and military work adds a layer that many San Diego subs discover the hard way: certified payroll, prevailing wage, and a prime contractor that will not release a dime until the paperwork is clean. The margin on that work is real. So is the administrative cost. We price the compliance labor into the bid, set up the job so the payroll system produces the reports, and keep the cash forecast honest about a 45-day payment cycle that the estimate assumed was 30.

Trouble in San Diego announces itself in a familiar order. The line of credit is fully drawn in spring and stays that way. Payroll taxes slip a quarter. A supplier moves the account 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 payroll from a home equity line for six months and calling 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-flow forecast built from actual receivables, actual payables, and actual payroll. 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 in the county is uneven. Health care and hospitality are adding jobs while private office construction has all but stopped, and residential permitting is concentrated in the South Bay and the East County rather than the job centers. A drywall or framing contractor tied to one product type can be resizing while an electrical sub next door turns down work. Both need the same thing: a real margin by job, a cash forecast that goes past next Friday, and the discipline to stop taking work that loses money slowly.

Housing cost is a payroll cost. San Diego County added roughly 36,000 housing units between 2022 and 2025, but very few of them near the largest job center in University City and Sorrento Valley, which means your crews commute from Temecula, Chula Vista, and the East County. That shows up as turnover, overtime, drive time on the clock, and a wage you did not plan on paying. We keep a labor-burden schedule that includes the real cost of keeping a crew, and we put it in the bid rather than discovering it in the fourth quarter.

The second challenge is the customer mix. A San Diego contractor often carries three kinds of work at once: private commercial that pays in 45 to 60 days, public and military that pays after a compliance review, and residential service that pays at the door. Each has a different cash cycle, a different margin, and a different risk. We report margin and days-to-cash by segment, so the owner can see that the Navy work is profitable but slow, the tenant work is fast but thin, and the service division is quietly paying for both.

The third challenge is California itself. Wage and hour rules, workers' compensation cost, the state's contractor licensing regime, and the sheer number of agencies that touch a jobsite make the back office more expensive here than in most of the country. That is the cost of doing business in a county with a Navy, a biotech corridor, and a border. We do not pretend it away. We make sure the labor burden, the compliance cost, and the payment cycle are in the forecast, so the decision to take a job is made with the whole picture.

• Labor burden that reflects commute, turnover, and California wage rules built into every bid
• Margin and days-to-cash reported by segment: private, public and military, and residential service
• Certified payroll and prevailing-wage compliance priced and staffed on federal work
• CSLB license bonds and surety capacity supported by a reconciled WIP schedule
• 20-day preliminary notices, stop notices, and retainage release dates tracked by job
• Fleet replacement and equipment financing planned rather than reacted to
• Competition for construction accounting talent answered with a documented, transferable process