Fractional CFO & Controller Services for Seattle Businesses

For a decade the Puget Sound economy ran on one engine, and every service business in the region learned to bill it. Tenant improvement contractors built out tech offices. Staffing, design, IT, and marketing firms invoiced the same three or four campuses. That engine is idling. Microsoft has vacated roughly 1.9 million square feet of office space in downtown Bellevue, Amazon has shed about a million square feet in Seattle while expanding on the Eastside, and Eastside office vacancy has climbed to 20.2 percent from 5.7 percent in 2019. Statewide nonfarm employment grew just 0.44 percent in the year to July 2026, to 3,668,300 jobs.

A company that grew to $12 million on that engine now has a back office built for one kind of customer and a sales pipeline full of another. The bookkeeper still codes everything to a single job. The controller, if there is one, is really a senior accountant with a better title. Margins by customer are unknown because nobody ever needed to know them. The bank line, sized in 2022 for a company that collected in 30 days, is now funding receivables that take 75 because the new customers are public agencies and general contractors, not software firms with a purchasing card.

The fix is a sequence, not a hire. Assess what is true about cash, margin, and debt. Clean up the ledger until the numbers can be trusted. 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 controller when the company can support one. That is how a Seattle firm that was built to serve one customer becomes a company that can price, bill, and collect from twenty.

Our clients are privately held companies between roughly $3 million and $50 million in revenue, run by the people who own them. Around Seattle that means mechanical, electrical, and plumbing contractors working out of Kent, Auburn, and Renton, general contractors in Tacoma and Everett who have moved from private tenant work to public and institutional projects, aerospace machine shops and suppliers along the I-5 corridor, marine and industrial service companies in Ballard and along the Duwamish, and professional-services firms in Bellevue and Redmond whose revenue used to arrive from a single campus and now has to be earned from many.

The situations repeat across industries. The owner approves every payment and reads cash from the bank app. The company doubled between 2021 and 2024 and the close, the billing, and the collections did not keep up. A lender wants a covenant certificate and a borrowing-base report, and both are late. A surety has capped the bonding program until the financial statements make sense. A partner buyout, an acquisition, or a sale is 18 months out and the books would not survive a quality-of-earnings review. Or the company is fine on paper and out of cash in fact, which is the most common Seattle story of the last two years.

You should call someone else if you need bookkeeping alone, a tax return, an audit opinion, or legal advice. We coordinate with the people who do those things and we stay in our lane. We will also tell you on the first call, at no charge, if what you actually need is a good bookkeeper and a bank conversation rather than a CFO.

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 Seattle that judgment gets applied to specific questions. Should a $9 million electrical contractor pursue Sound Transit subcontract work when the agency faces an affordability gap it has estimated at $34.5 billion over 20 years and has already split the Ballard extension into funded and deferred segments? What does a $21.30 minimum wage, effective in the city on January 1, 2026, do to the labor burden on a service contract priced in 2024? Can the company carry 90 days of payroll ahead of a first pay application on a public job?

We answer those questions with a model, a bank conversation, and a decision, usually in the same week. The working tools are a 13-week cash forecast updated every Monday, a monthly package that shows margin by customer and by job, a lender relationship that is managed rather than endured, and a pricing discipline that puts the cost of Washington's business and occupation tax, measured on gross receipts with no deduction for labor or materials, into every bid rather than discovering it at filing time. The national overview of our fractional CFO service covers the full scope. This page is about how it works between Everett and Tacoma.

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 your bank and surety are asking for. Travel to the Seattle area 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, keep a job-cost ledger that ties to the general ledger, produce a WIP schedule the surety can read without calling you, run receivables and payables on a calendar, and reconcile every bank, loan, and credit-card account monthly. For a contractor that includes retainage tracking, change-order billing, and the percentage-of-completion adjustments that turn a cash-basis guess into a real margin. For a service firm it means revenue recognized when it is earned and deferred revenue that the bank believes.

Hiring a controller in Seattle means competing with companies that pay in stock. A $10 million contractor in Kent cannot match a Bellevue software firm for a construction accountant who also knows Sage 300 CRE, and every strong candidate knows it. A fractional controller solves that by running the function and writing it down, so the next hire inherits a close calendar, a chart of accounts that makes sense, and a documented process rather than a shoebox. We work in QuickBooks, Sage 300 CRE, ServiceTitan, JD Edwards, and Power BI, which covers most of what is installed between Lynnwood and Federal Way.

Controller engagements start at $2,500 per month. The scope is written on day one, the deliverables are the same every month, and the cash position can be 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.

Washington registers contractors through the Department of Labor & Industries rather than licensing them by exam, and the registration bond doubled under a law effective July 1, 2024: $30,000 for general contractors and $15,000 for specialty contractors. That is the entry ticket. Surety capacity for project bonds is the larger question, and it rests on the quality of your financial statements: a credible WIP schedule, consistent gross margins by job, working capital that does not vanish 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 delayed by the last close.

Lien rights in Washington run on a short calendar. On commercial and multifamily work, a subcontractor or supplier generally must deliver a notice of right to claim lien within 60 days of first furnishing labor or materials, and on single-family residential work the window is 10 days. The lien itself must be recorded within 90 days of last furnishing. Miss the notice and the lien covers only the recent work. We build the notice calendar into the billing process, so the paperwork goes out with the first invoice rather than after the first missed payment. Whether and when to file is a decision for your attorney. Making sure the option still exists is ours.

Washington's tax structure also shapes contractor cash. Custom construction for a consumer is generally a retail sale here, which means B&O tax and retail sales tax are collected on the full contract price including labor, and a contractor who priced a job without that line has just given away the margin. The rules differ for speculative building, government work, and public-road construction. We do not give tax advice. We do make sure the job setup, the resale certificates, and the ledger capture what your CPA needs, and we get the CPA in the room before the first invoice goes out.

Trouble around Seattle right now arrives from the residential side. Applications for new housing in the city have fallen 94 percent from their 2020 peak, and at the end of 2025 nearly 9,955 union construction workers in Washington were out of work, including more than 1,700 apprentices who could not get dispatched. A framing, drywall, or site contractor built for the 2021 pipeline is resizing whether the owner has decided to or not. The line of credit is fully drawn in March and stays that way. Payroll taxes slip a quarter. Vendors move you to COD. The bank asks for a plan.

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 numbers attached, because banks extend patience to borrowers who show up with a forecast. 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 other Seattle turnaround is the quiet one. A professional-services firm that lost its anchor tech customer still has 40 employees, a lease signed in 2022, and a partner group that has not cut its own draws. The margin by client, when someone finally calculates it, shows that two accounts carried the firm and eight lost money slowly. That is not a crisis yet. It becomes one in about nine months. Finding it in a spreadsheet in month one is cheaper than finding it at the bank in month nine.

Rain is a schedule and therefore a cash cycle. Site work, roofing, paving, and exterior trades in the Puget Sound region compress into the dry months and stall from November through March, which means a contractor earns most of its margin in half the year and pays for all twelve. Equipment payments do not pause in January. We build the seasonal curve into the forecast, size the line of credit to the winter trough rather than the July peak, and push billing on interior and covered work into the months when the exterior crews are idle.

Public money is the region's largest customer and its slowest payer. Transit, port, school district, and utility work carries retainage, long approval chains, and prevailing-wage compliance that a $5 million sub has never had to administer. Sound Transit's funding gap means some of that pipeline will slide, and a contractor that has staffed up for it needs a forecast with a scenario where the award comes 14 months late. Aerospace suppliers face the mirror problem: a single customer's production rate decides whether the shop runs one shift or two, and the bank wants to know which.

Seattle also asks more of an employer than most cities. The city minimum wage, paid sick and safe time, and a payroll expense tax on large employers all land on the labor burden, and the state's B&O tax lands on gross receipts before the first dollar of profit. None of it is unmanageable. All of it has to be in the bid. We keep a labor-burden schedule by jurisdiction and update it when the rates change, which in this region is every January.

• Wet-season schedule compression modeled into cash, credit lines, and billing timing
• Public-agency retainage, prevailing wage, and long approval chains built into the forecast
• B&O tax on gross receipts and retail sales tax on construction priced into every bid
• L&I registration bonds and surety capacity supported by a credible WIP schedule
• Lien notice deadlines of 60 days commercial and 10 days residential tracked with the first invoice
• Customer concentration risk measured and reported for firms that grew on one tech account
• Construction accounting talent shortage answered with a documented, transferable process