Fractional CFO & Controller Services for Tampa Businesses

A Tampa Bay trades company lives on two calendars. The first is the demand calendar: air conditioning fails from June through September, roofs get replaced after the storms, and pool and plumbing work follows the builders into Wesley Chapel and Lakewood Ranch. The second is the cash calendar, which runs 45 to 75 days behind the first. A plumbing contractor that lands a 300-lot production builder in Pasco County has just committed to two months of labor and pipe before the first draw funds, and nobody sized the credit line for it.

The symptoms are consistent across the bay. Receivables age while the line carries payroll. A supplier in Plant City moves the company to prepay after the second late month. The bookkeeper who was fine at $3 million is now three months behind on reconciliations, and the WIP schedule is a number the owner says out loud rather than a report anyone can open. Meanwhile, a hospital system in St. Petersburg is hiring construction accountants for salaries a $9 million mechanical sub cannot match.

The fix is a sequence. Assess what is actually true about cash, margin, and debt. Clean up the ledger until 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. That is how a $5 million service company in Largo becomes a $20 million company without the accounting department becoming the reason it stalls in the first September that brings a named storm.

Our clients are privately held companies between roughly $3 million and $50 million in revenue, owned by the people who run them. In Tampa Bay that means HVAC contractors and plumbing contractors running fleets out of Brandon, Largo, and Pinellas Park, electrical contractors on the airport and hospital work, roofing and restoration companies that live on the storm cycle, general contractors building in Wesley Chapel, Riverview, and the Interstate 4 corridor toward Lakeland, and the building-materials distributors that supply all of them. We also serve home-services companies, pool builders, marine and powersports dealers, and professional-services firms.

The situations repeat. The owner approves every check and reads cash from the bank balance. The controller retired to Bradenton and took the process with her. The bank wants monthly reporting and a borrowing-base certificate, and both are guesses. A surety has capped the bond line because the last WIP schedule showed under-billings nobody could explain. Revenue doubled in two years and the close did not. A private-equity buyer is circling a home-services company and the books would not survive a quality-of-earnings review.

You should hire someone else if you need bookkeeping alone, tax preparation, an audit opinion, or legal advice. We work beside the people who do those things and hand them cleaner books. If your plan is to hire a full-time CFO and hope the ledger cleans itself, 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 practice that is a 13-week cash forecast updated every Monday, a supplier credit line sized to the pre-season buy, a bank relationship that is managed rather than endured, and a monthly package that tells you which service line earns money and which one only keeps the trucks busy. The national fractional CFO page covers the full scope. This page is about how it works between Clearwater and Plant City.

Tampa Bay lenders have lived through two hurricanes in one autumn, and they read a borrower's cash forecast closely. A roofing company that tripled after Milton needs to show the bank what revenue looks like in a year with no landfall. An HVAC contractor with $4 million of maintenance agreements needs the deferred revenue accounted for correctly before a buyer's diligence team finds it. 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, and urgency. One-time cleanup, software, and travel to Florida are separate unless expressly included.

A controller's job is to make the numbers true and on time. Our fractional controller closes the month within 10 business days, keeps a job-cost or service-line ledger that ties to the general ledger, produces a WIP schedule a surety can read, runs receivables and payables on a calendar, and reconciles every bank, loan, and credit-card account monthly. For a trades company that includes maintenance-agreement deferred revenue, technician productivity by truck, inventory on the vans, and the builder draw schedule matched to the billing.

In Tampa Bay the hard part is not the work. It is keeping the person who does it. The hospital systems, the insurers, and the financial-services back offices in Westshore all hire from the same pool of accountants, and they pay more than a $10 million contractor can. A fractional controller solves that by running the function and documenting it, so the next hire inherits a procedure manual instead of a rumor. We work in QuickBooks, ServiceTitan, Sage 300 CRE, JD Edwards, and Power BI.

Controller engagements start at $2,500 per month. The scope is written down on day one and the deliverables are the same every month: financial statements, service-line and 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.

Florida licenses contractors statewide through the Department of Business and Professional Regulation and its Construction Industry Licensing Board, and the license carries a financial-responsibility test. An applicant needs a FICO-derived credit score of 660 or better and no unsatisfied judgments. Below 660, the Board requires a bond or letter of credit, $20,000 for Division I licenses such as general and building contractors and $10,000 for Division II specialty trades, halved after the Board's 14-hour financial-responsibility course. The qualifier's personal credit is a business asset, and a missed judgment can stall the license before the surety ever sees a WIP schedule.

Florida's lien law is a pair of deadlines that decide whether you get paid. A subcontractor, sub-subcontractor, or supplier with no direct contract with the owner must serve a Notice to Owner within 45 days of first furnishing labor or materials, and in any case before the owner makes final payment to the contractor. A claim of lien must then be recorded within 90 days of the last day of work. We build the Notice to Owner into job setup and put the 90-day clock on the collections calendar, and your construction attorney handles anything that turns into a claim.

Sales tax on Florida construction turns on who the ultimate consumer is. Under the Department of Revenue's rules, a contractor performing a real property improvement is the consumer of the materials and pays sales tax to the supplier, and does not charge the customer tax on the finished work. An HVAC or electrical contractor that also sells and installs equipment that does not become part of the structure can face a different treatment. We do not give tax advice. We make sure the job setup and the supplier invoices capture what your CPA needs, and we ask the CPA before the first invoice goes out.

Trouble on the bay tends to arrive in the same order. The credit line hits its ceiling in July and does not come back down in November. Payroll taxes slip a quarter. A distributor in Tampa moves you to COD the week before the season ends. The surety asks for an updated WIP schedule and stops calling after reading it. By the time the bank asks for a meeting, the owner has been funding payroll from savings for 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 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 a plan attached, because Florida banks have workout groups that have seen every version of this and prefer 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 new. Our turnaround CFO and 13-week cash-flow forecast pages cover the mechanics.

The current cycle is uneven. Metro payrolls grew by about 8,600 jobs in the year to July 2026, a 0.6 percent pace, while industrial absorption went negative and developers cut project sizes. A site contractor that staffed up for warehouse pads along Interstate 4 and a restoration company still working 2024 storm claims 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.

Hurricane season is a line in the forecast, not a footnote. In 2024 the bay took two storms in two weeks: Helene's surge from 100 miles offshore exceeded Milton's, and Milton went on to produce roughly $25 billion in insured losses statewide, the largest of any event that year. For a contractor that means a week of zero revenue, then a quarter of emergency work at premium rates, then insurance receivables that pay in 120 days. We build a storm scenario into the 13-week cash forecast every June: crew costs for the shutdown, the working capital for the recovery work, and the collections lag that follows.

Growth on the bay runs north and east, and the cash cycle follows the builders. Pasco County grew more than 15 percent in five years, and a plumbing or electrical contractor that follows the production builders into Wesley Chapel and Land O' Lakes takes on draw schedules that pay by phase, not by month. We model the draw calendar against payroll before the first lot is started, and we size the supplier terms and the credit line to the gap.

Insurance is the third challenge, and it lands in the operating budget. Property coverage on a shop in Pinellas County, fleet coverage on 20 trucks, and the liability and workers' compensation a general contractor's certificate demands have all climbed faster than revenue. A bid priced on last year's premium loses money quietly. We track insurance as its own line in the labor burden and rebid the program annually. Somewhere in Hillsborough County an owner is about to learn that his largest builder account has never covered its own insurance. Better to find that in a spreadsheet.

• Storm-season shutdown, recovery surge, and insurance-receivable lag built into the June cash forecast
• Notice to Owner served inside 45 days and the 90-day lien clock tracked with collections
• Production-builder draw schedules modeled against payroll before the first lot starts
• Pre-season equipment buys financed with supplier terms and a credit line sized to the gap
• Maintenance-agreement deferred revenue accounted for before a buyer's diligence finds it
• Contractor-as-consumer sales tax treatment captured in job setup for the CPA
• Qualifier credit, judgments, and CILB financial-responsibility requirements watched alongside the surety file