Fractional CFO & Controller Services for St. Louis Businesses

St. Louis companies rarely run out of customers. They run out of patience between the invoice and the deposit. The metro carried about 1.43 million nonfarm jobs in August 2026, with roughly 92,700 in mining, logging, and construction, and preliminary federal estimates show construction-sector employment up sharply year over year. That growth arrives as large build-to-suit projects with long approval chains. A $5 million plumbing contractor that wins a package on a distribution center in Metro East has taken on 90 days of labor and material before the first draw, and the bank has not been told.

The symptoms show up in the same order every time. The bookkeeper who was fine at $3 million is closing the books six weeks late at $8 million. Receivables age past 60 days while the line of credit quietly covers payroll. Change orders are performed, argued about, and never billed. The surety asks for a WIP schedule and receives a spreadsheet with three tabs named Final, Final2, and Use This One. The owner cannot say what last month earned, because nobody can.

The sequence that fixes it is not complicated, but it has to happen in order. Assess what is actually true about cash, margin, and debt. Clean up the ledger so the numbers can be trusted. Stabilize the weekly cash cycle and the monthly close. Document the process so it survives a resignation. 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 St. Louis contractor goes from $6 million to $20 million 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 St. Louis that means general contractors in Clayton and Chesterfield, HVAC contractors and plumbing contractors running fleets out of Fenton and O'Fallon, electrical contractors working the warehouse corridors in Earth City and Edwardsville, and the building-materials yards and distributors that keep all of them supplied. We also work with home-services companies, professional-services firms, and the specialty subs that are suddenly tier-two vendors to a defense campus and learning what that paperwork looks like.

The situations repeat. The controller retired, or was never really a controller. The bank wants monthly covenant reporting and a WIP schedule, and both are late. Revenue doubled in three years and the close, the billing, and the collections did not. A partner buyout or a sale to the next generation is coming and the books would not survive diligence. Or cash is short, the vendors in Wentzville 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 stay in our lane. And if your plan is to hire a full-time CFO and hope the ledger heals itself, we will talk you out of it on the first call, free of 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 from margin data instead of memory, 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 Wentzville and Belleville.

St. Louis lenders have seen more than one cycle and they read WIP schedules with care. A contractor that wants to bid a package on the Boeing expansion, or on the next build-to-suit in St. Charles County, needs to know before signing whether it can fund the labor and material ahead of a first pay application, and whether the line of credit will stretch that far. Equipment replacement for a fleet that idles through January needs a 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, keep a job-cost ledger that ties to the general ledger, produce a WIP schedule a 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, and the percentage-of-completion adjustments that turn a cash-basis guess into a real margin.

In St. Louis the hard part is not the work, it is the hiring. Health systems, defense contractors, and the large publicly traded builders all recruit from the same pool of construction accountants, and a $10 million subcontractor in Kirkwood 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 Florissant and Fenton.

Controller engagements start at $2,500 per month. The scope is written on day one, the close calendar is published, and the deliverables repeat 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.

Missouri does not license general contractors, plumbers, HVAC contractors, or electricians at the state level. Licensing, bonding, and insurance requirements are set county by county and city by city, which means a contractor working in St. Louis County, St. Charles County, the city of St. Louis, and Madison County in Illinois may hold four different credentials with four renewal calendars. That is an administrative burden, and it is also a finance problem: a lapsed municipal license can stop a permit, a stopped permit stops a draw, and a stopped draw is a cash event. We keep the license and bond calendar inside the finance function where someone will actually look at it.

Missouri lien law has teeth, and they are set on a clock. Claimants other than the prime contractor generally must give the owner 10 days' notice before filing a lien, and on owner-occupied residential work the contractor must deliver a notice of rights before taking payment or risk losing the lien altogether. Liens are generally filed within six months of the last work and enforced within six months after that. We do not give legal advice. We do build the notice calendar into the billing process so your attorney is consulted before a deadline, not after, and we get your CPA in the room before a large job is set up in the ledger.

Surety capacity in this market rests on financial statements the underwriter believes. That means a WIP schedule that reconciles, consistent gross margins by job, working capital that does not vanish at year end, and an owner who can explain the numbers without a translator. Our principal has managed mechanic's liens, claims, and litigation support coordination for multi-entity contractors, and has built the lender and surety package that keeps the next bid from waiting on the last close. Our construction CFO page covers the mechanics in detail.

Trouble in St. Louis announces itself quietly. The line of credit is fully drawn in March and never comes back down. Payroll taxes slip a quarter. A supplier in Earth City moves you to COD without a phone call. The surety asks for an updated WIP and goes silent. By the time the bank calls, the owner has been funding payroll from savings for six months and calling it a bridge loan. 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 arrive 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 is uneven here. Industrial vacancy rose to 5.8 percent in the first quarter of 2026 with negative net absorption, even as South County sat at 1.2 percent and St. Charles County at 2.4 percent. A sub tied to speculative warehouse work is resizing at the same time a sub on the defense campus 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 its best customer was never profitable, and it is cheaper to learn that in a spreadsheet.

Winter is a working-capital line. A trade contractor here loses productive hours to cold, ice, and short days from December through February, and the fixed costs do not pause. Crews are kept on to keep them, equipment sits, and the March pay applications carry January's overhead. The right structure is a cash forecast that prices the slow quarter in advance, a seasonal line of credit sized to the trough rather than the average, and a service or maintenance base that bills through the cold months. Bids made in July should carry a winter productivity assumption, and most do not.

The metro's growth is lopsided, and that shapes collections. St. Charles County grows, the city and St. Louis County shrink, and the Metro East is flat. A remodeler or HVAC contractor whose customer base is aging in place in North County has a different receivables profile than one serving new subdivisions in Wentzville, and the two should not share a pricing model. We build the forecast by customer segment so the owner can see which half of the business is carrying the other half, and for how long.

Large federal and defense projects bring a particular cash pattern: long approval chains, strict invoicing formats, and payments that arrive precisely on time and never early. A $4 million electrical package that sits three tiers below the owner can require four months of financing before the first dollar arrives. We model that before the bid, size the line to it, and put the preliminary-notice dates on the same calendar as the billing dates. The alternative is discovering the financing need in month three, when the bank is least interested in hearing about it.

• Winter productivity loss and fixed overhead priced into bids and the cash forecast
• County-by-county licensing and bond renewals tracked inside the finance calendar
• Missouri lien notice deadlines built into billing rather than handled after the fact
• Build-to-suit and defense-project cash cycles financed before the bid, not after
• Segment-level margin and receivables for companies serving both growing and shrinking parts of the metro
• Surety and lender packages that survive a careful underwriter
• Competition for construction accounting talent answered with a documented, transferable process