Fractional Controller

Overview

This is a build role, not a bookkeeping role — bookkeeping support is already in place. We need someone to design the financial architecture on top of it: systems, integrations, forecasting, and job-costing discipline that let leadership make confident calls on crew growth, hiring, and cash management.

Responsibilities

• Design and maintain a per-crew / per-job P&L structure in the cloud accounting system (classes or projects) mapped to field-service job and crew data
• Diagnose and fix breakdowns in the field-service software ↔ cloud accounting sync as job volume and crew count scale, building workarounds or middleware where needed
• Ensure job-level cost coding (labor, materials, equipment, overhead allocation) is accurate enough to drive pricing and crew-performance decisions
• Build and maintain a rolling short-term cash flow forecast (roughly three months), accounting for seasonal early-year demand troughs and cash drag from ramping new crews
• Develop per-crew unit economics — fully-loaded cost per crew (wages, burden, truck, equipment, training) vs. breakeven timeline — to guide how many crews can be added per year
• Advise on capital planning for growth: equipment/truck financing vs. cash purchase, and establishing banking relationships/credit lines ahead of need
• Own the monthly close process in partnership with the outsourced bookkeeping team
• Deliver monthly forecast-vs-actual reporting and P&L by crew/segment (not just company-wide)
• Translate financial data into plain-English insights leadership can act on — margin by crew, by product line
• Support scenario planning for growth decisions: new crew adds, geographic density, pricing/mix changes
• Provide financial guardrails and KPIs that let leadership delegate operating decisions without losing visibility
• Push back directly when the numbers indicate a different course than leadership prefers
• Hold external partners (bookkeepers, accountants) accountable to standards you define

Qualifications

• 5+ years of accounting/finance experience; construction, landscaping, or field-service industry experience strongly preferred — comfortable with job costing, WIP, progress billing, and seasonal cash cycles
• Hands-on experience implementing or administering field-service software and its cloud accounting integration
• Track record designing financial processes in a fast-growth or previously "startup" environment — not just maintaining already-clean books
• Comfortable holding external partners to standards you set
• Direct communicator, low ego, willing to disagree with ownership when data warrants it
• Based in or able to work with a Pacific Time Zone team