SPM runs the entire finance function for commercial subcontractors doing $1M to $12M: bookkeeping, job costing, the WIP schedule, cash forecasting, billing and collections, the overhead rate, and one monthly meeting that ends in decisions. One firm, one fee, no seams between vendors. It starts at $1,900 a month, a client is fully onboarded in 60 days, and it's built so the owner spends about five hours a month on any of it.
You're not a mom and pop shop. You have systems, your crews are good, your jobs look profitable, and you already pay for accounting software. All of that's true and none of it answers the question you keep asking yourself, which is where the money went.
THE TWO WAYS TO SOLVE IT
ONE HIRE, OR ALL OF IT.
Most owners reach this decision the same way, which is to hire somebody to do the books. It's the obvious move and it's rarely the cheap one, because a salary isn't a cost. Here's the same math this practice makes contractors run on their field labor, turned around and pointed at the office.
HIRE ONE BOOKKEEPER
$93,100 to $126,100
a year, loaded, with the software
You manage them. Reviewing the work and correcting it falls to the person who wanted it off his desk
Three to six months before a good hire is useful, and the numbers are unreliable for all of it
Vacation, sick days and the weeks around a departure, when the closing stops
Recruiting and replacing, which comes round again every time the role turns over
Nobody above them. A bookkeeper records what happened, and there's no controller checking it
Construction specifics nobody taught them: job costing to the estimate, WIP, retainage, prevailing wage
What their coding errors cost in March, when your CPA bills to clean up twelve months of it
A ceiling. One person caps out, and growing past them means doing this a second time
Coverage that doesn't stop. Two people, so a holiday or an illness never means a month without a close
The software, inside the fee and not beside it, and set up for you, not dropped on your desk
A controller layer checking the books are right, which a single hire doesn't have above them
Job costing built to how you estimate, plus WIP, retainage and change orders
Cash forecasting dated on when your general contractors really pay
Billing and collections strategy, so money you already earned reaches the bank sooner
Books kept right through the year, so your CPA files from a clean set and never rebuilds one
Somebody who ran commercial construction, reading the job cost report
Teaching, when you want it, on what the next size of company will need from you financially
The hire column is $70,000 of salary, which is the figure this site already uses for the role, plus payroll burden at 25 to 35 percent, plus construction accounting software at $300 to $2,300 a month, plus a desk and a laptop. Burden is on its own line and not folded in, because burden is the thing this practice tells contractors to stop ignoring.
Above roughly $9.5M this stops being a straight swap and we won't pretend otherwise. At that size the structure that works is usually both: somebody internal handling the transaction volume, with SPM on job costing, WIP and the CFO layer above it.When to hire office help covers where that line sits for your revenue.
THE PART THE SYSTEMS DON'T COVER
THE NUMBERS ARE ALL THERE. NOBODY IS READING THEM.
Every contractor we talk to at this size has the data. The invoices got entered, the software is paid for, the statements come out every month. What's missing is the person whose job is to read the whole thing and say what it means, because that person doesn't exist in a company with fourteen people and a full schedule. So it falls to you, at night, after the day you already worked.
It doesn't get done properly either, because it can't. Reading a job cost report against an estimate, testing whether a WIP schedule is right, working out whether overhead grew faster than revenue: that isn't work you fit around running a company. It's a job. Owners describe the result the same way over and over. Everything goes into one bucket. They don't know what they don't know. It all goes at the speed of them.
WHAT PLENTY OF OWNERS WANT
Plenty of owners don't want to get better at this. They want it gone. That's a perfectly reasonable thing to want, and it's most of why this practice exists. Wanting nothing to do with your own accounting is an accurate read of what you're good at.
WHAT COMES OFF YOUR DESK
ALL OF IT, AND THIS IS THE LIST.
Not advice about these things. The things themselves, done by somebody else, every month, whether or not you ask.
The day to day bookkeeping, meaning the coding, the bank recs, the payables and the month end close
Job costing built against the way you estimate, so a cost report compares to the number you bid and not to a template
The WIP schedule, monthly, whether or not a bank has asked for one yet
Cash forecasting dated on when your general contractors really pay, not on the terms in the contract
Billing and collections discipline, which is chasing the money you already earned before it ages
The overhead rate, recalculated from your own costs, not left at whatever it was when you started
One monthly meeting that ends in a short list of decisions, and a next meeting that starts by checking whether they happened
Anybody promising a contractor he'll never think about his finances again is selling something that doesn't work. Here's the part that stays yours, stated up front so it isn't a surprise in month two.
Approving the decisions. Nobody signs anything on your behalf and nobody moves money
Answering questions about the work, because we can read a job cost report and you know why that job went sideways
The monthly meeting, which is the one thing on this list with a fixed time cost
That's the five hours. It's the meeting, a handful of questions during the month, and the decisions that come out of both. Everything else on the list above is ours.
WHAT SPM DOESN'T DO
THE SHORT LIST, SO NOBODY IS SURPRISED.
Not payroll. Not tax preparation. Not audit or review work. Not business development, and not sales training. Your CPA keeps the return and the compliance work, and they do it faster against a set of books that was right all year instead of reconstructed every March.
There's also a size below which this doesn't make sense yet. If you're doing under a million and the whole finance job is four hours a month, a bookkeeper andthe workbooks on this site will serve you better than we would, and Josh will tell you that on the call, not after you've signed something.
$10.7M+
Client AR Recovered Since 2023
48
Active Trade Specializations
60 DAYS
Average Onboarding Time
COMMON QUESTIONS
WHAT OWNERS ASK FIRST.
The engagement is built so an owner spends about five hours a month on his finances, and most of that's the monthly meeting. It isn't zero and we won't pretend it is. Nobody can run your numbers without ever asking you a question, because half of what a cost report says depends on things only you know about the job. What goes away is the reading, the chasing, the coding, and the wondering.
Usually not. In most cases she keeps doing the parts she does well and stops being asked to do the parts nobody trained her for, which is normally the job costing and anything that needs reading rather than entering. That conversation happens on the first call and it's yours to have, not ours.
No, and that's the point of the page. You will understand your own numbers better a year in, because somebody will have explained them to you every month, and understanding them is different from operating the system that produces them. You will never be asked to run ControlQore. We run it.
Keep them. SPM doesn't do tax preparation, audit or review work, and doesn't want to. Your CPA files the return and handles compliance, and they do it faster against books that were already right all year. Most of them are relieved.
No. Bookkeeping records what happened. What this adds is the layer that reads it and tells you what to do, which is the part almost nobody sells to a company your size. The three layers and how they stack is the longer answer.
It starts at $1,900 a month and the band is set by your last twelve months of revenue. Every band is published on the pricing page rather than quoted on a call, so you can work out what you would pay before you ever speak to anybody.
Sixty days to fully onboarded. The books get migrated back to the start of your last taxable year so the history is consistent, the job cost structure gets built against your estimating, and the monthly cadence starts. What happens every month covers the part after that.
Former commercial project manager and master electrician: 150+ projects worth $2.1B combined, from $50,000 to $300M. Now fractional CFO to commercial subcontractors.
Josh asks questions to work out whether he can help at all. Nothing gets sold on this call and nothing gets proposed. If he can't help, he'll point you at what will. If he can, you'll set a second, longer call to walk through how it would work for your business. Come to talk shop! That's it.
You don't hire a CFO because it's safe, you do it because the real risk isn't having one.
