Fractional CFO & Controller Services for San Francisco Businesses

San Francisco companies in our range are not the venture-backed startups the city is famous for. They are the businesses that serve them and everyone else: contractors, engineering and design firms, staffing agencies, food and beverage distributors, property-services companies, and family-owned businesses in the East Bay and on the Peninsula that have outlasted three cycles. Their problem is not raising money. It is running a company where every cost is the highest in the country and the customer base changes faster than the chart of accounts.

The symptoms are consistent. The books are on cash basis because the CPA prefers it, so the owner has no idea what the company earned in any given month. Receivables from a fast-growing customer run 60 days because nobody has time to chase them. The bank line was sized for a company half this size. A construction firm has a WIP schedule that lives in the estimator's head. The professional-services firm bills hourly, runs a 58 percent realization rate, and calls it a busy year. The controller resigned in February and the search has been open since March, which in this labor market is not a surprise.

The fix follows a sequence. 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 a full-time hire when the company can support one. A Bay Area company that runs on accrual numbers, a weekly cash forecast, and a margin report by customer can grow into the recovery instead of being surprised by it.

Our clients are privately held companies between roughly $3 million and $50 million in revenue, owned by the people who run them. In the Bay Area that includes electrical, mechanical, and low-voltage contractors doing tenant improvements in SoMa and Mission Bay, general contractors in Oakland and Hayward, life-sciences fit-out and equipment subs in South San Francisco, professional-services firms on the Peninsula, distributors and light manufacturers in Fremont and Concord, and the property-services and facilities companies that keep a partly empty downtown running.

The situations repeat. The company grew back fast in 2025 and 2026 and the systems did not. A partner is retiring and the buyout requires a valuation the books cannot support. A lender wants covenant reporting, a borrowing base, and a real forecast. A surety wants a WIP schedule that reconciles to the general ledger. An acquisition target has three entities and one QuickBooks file. Or cash is short in a company that is profitable on paper, because the profit is sitting in a general contractor's retainage account.

You should hire someone else if you need bookkeeping alone, tax preparation, an audit opinion, fundraising for a startup, or legal advice. We coordinate with the people who do those things. And if your plan is to hire a full-time CFO at a Bay Area salary to fix books that a good controller could fix in 90 days, 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 San Francisco that judgment goes to questions the city forces on every owner. Should a $7 million contractor take a $3 million fit-out for a customer that did not exist two years ago, and how much of the labor can it fund before the first draw? What does a $19.61 minimum wage, effective July 1, 2026, plus the city's health care and paid-leave ordinances, do to a service contract priced last year? Where does the company sit relative to the $5 million gross-receipts exemption that took effect under Proposition M in January 2025, and what happens to the tax line when revenue crosses it?

We do not decide the tax position. We put it in the forecast and get your CPA in the room. The working tools are the same for every client: a 13-week cash forecast updated every Monday, a monthly package with margin by customer and by job, a lender relationship that is managed instead of endured, and pricing built from actual labor burden rather than last year's guess. The national overview of our fractional CFO service covers the full scope. This page is about how it works between Marin and San Jose.

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, reporting condition, urgency, and stakeholder demands. Travel to the Bay Area 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 or project ledger that ties to the general ledger, produce a WIP schedule the surety and the bank can read, run receivables and payables on a published calendar, and reconcile every bank, loan, and credit-card account monthly. For a contractor that includes retainage tracking, change-order billing, and percentage-of-completion adjustments. For a services firm it means utilization and realization reported by person and by client, not averaged into a number that hides the problem.

The Bay Area labor market for accountants is the most expensive in the country, and a $10 million company competes for the same controller as a funded startup offering equity. Most lose. A fractional controller solves that by running the function and documenting it, so when the company is ready to hire, the new controller inherits a close calendar, a reconciled ledger, and a written process instead of a mystery. We work in QuickBooks, Sage 300 CRE, ServiceTitan, JD Edwards, and Power BI, and we are comfortable with the cloud accounting stack most Bay Area firms already run.

Controller engagements start at $2,500 per month. The scope is written on day one and the deliverables are the same every month: financial statements, project or job reports, WIP where it applies, aging, and a cash position you can read in five minutes. When the company can support 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 protects the public, not your bonding capacity. Surety credit for project bonds is a separate and larger matter, and it is decided on your financial statements: a WIP schedule that reconciles, gross margins by job that hold from bid to closeout, working capital that is real, and an owner who can explain the numbers to an underwriter. We build that package and keep it current, because in the Bay Area the difference between a $2 million program and a $10 million program is the difference between tenant work and the projects that matter.

California's payment protections run on a 20-day clock. A subcontractor or supplier who wants to preserve lien and stop-notice rights on a private job generally serves a preliminary notice within 20 days of first furnishing labor or materials. Serve it late and the protection covers only the work in the 20 days before the notice and afterward. On a fast-moving fit-out, that clock can run out before the first invoice is drafted. We build preliminary notices into the job setup so the paperwork goes out with the mobilization, and we track retainage and release deadlines by job. Whether to enforce a lien is your attorney's call. Keeping the right alive is ours.

The larger construction question in San Francisco is concentration. A contractor whose backlog is 70 percent artificial-intelligence tenant work has a good year ahead and a fragile balance sheet. Leases signed in a hurry can be exited in a hurry. We report backlog by customer and by sector, run the cash forecast with a scenario in which the largest customer pauses, and size the overhead to survive that scenario. That is not pessimism. It is what a lender will ask for, and it is better to have the answer before the question.

Trouble in the Bay Area tends to hide behind revenue. A company can grow 30 percent, add 15 people, sign a bigger lease, and run out of cash in the same year, because growth consumes working capital before it returns it. The line is fully drawn by June. Payroll taxes slip a quarter. Vendors move to COD. The bank wants a forecast and gets a budget from January with a new date on it. By the time the owner calls, the business has been running on personal savings for six months and calling it a bridge.

We start with a 13-week cash 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 describe the mechanics.

The other Bay Area turnaround is the slow one. A family-owned distributor in the East Bay has lost 20 percent of its volume since 2019, kept every employee, and drawn on a line that was meant for inventory. The owner is 64. The books are on cash basis and the sons want to buy the company. That situation needs real margins by product line, a right-sized cost structure, a bank that understands the transition, and a set of financial statements a buyer can believe. It also needs someone to say the hard part out loud, which is usually the first thing we do.

Cost is the first challenge and it is not just wages. The city's minimum wage, the Health Care Security Ordinance, paid sick leave, and the state's overtime and meal-period rules combine into a labor burden that a company from another state would not recognize. Commercial rent, parking, tolls, and insurance add to it. A service business that prices from a national benchmark loses money here. We build a labor-burden schedule by jurisdiction and put it into every bid and every forecast, and we update it each July when the city rate changes.

The second challenge is the gross-receipts tax. Proposition M raised the small-business exemption to $5 million in San Francisco-sourced receipts and reduced the number of business categories, which helps companies below the line and changes the calculation for everyone above it. A contractor or services firm crossing $5 million needs to know before it happens, not after, and needs its revenue sourcing documented well enough for the CPA to defend. We keep the schedule and coordinate with the CPA. We do not decide the tax position.

The third challenge is the recovery itself. Office vacancy is falling fast in Mission Bay and the northern waterfront and remains high elsewhere, and the region's population is essentially flat while the city's has begun to grow again. That pattern rewards companies that can pick their customers and punishes companies that take every job. A margin report by customer, a backlog report by sector, and a weekly cash forecast are how a Bay Area owner picks.

• Labor burden built from city and state wage, health, and leave ordinances, updated every July
• Gross-receipts tax exposure tracked against the $5 million exemption and coordinated with the CPA
• Backlog concentration in artificial-intelligence tenant work measured and stress-tested in the forecast
• CSLB license bonds and surety capacity supported by a reconciled WIP schedule
• 20-day preliminary notices and retainage deadlines built into job setup
• Partner buyouts and family transitions supported with accrual financials a buyer can believe
• Bay Area accounting talent costs answered with a documented, transferable process