Construction Controller
About the Role
We are an outsourced accounting and CFO firm serving construction and home service businesses with $2M–$10M in annual revenue. Our clients are owner-operators — they build homes, remodel kitchens, install HVAC, run service crews. They are excellent at their trade and they need someone who is excellent at the numbers.
That is this role.
As a Construction Controller, you are the financial leader for a portfolio of client businesses. You own their entire accounting function end to end — not by delegating it, but by doing it. You close their books, run their payroll, manage their AP and AR, build their budgets, and then you sit across from the owner and tell them what the numbers actually mean and what they should do about it.
This is a hands-on, individual contributor role. You will not be managing a team of bookkeepers, AP clerks, or staff accountants. You are the bookkeeper, the AP clerk, the staff accountant, and the controller — and then you are the advisor. If you are looking for a role where you review other people's work, this is not it.
Client load: You will own the full accounting function for approximately 10-15 client businesses at any given time.
What You'll Own
Full-cycle accounting execution
- Run the complete monthly close for each client: bank and credit card reconciliations, balance sheet reconciliations, accruals, journal entries, and general ledger integrity.
- Process accounts payable end to end through Ramp and Bill.com — vendor setup, bill capture and coding, approval routing, payment runs, and subcontractor/supplier management.
- Manage accounts receivable: progress billing, draw schedules, retainage tracking, invoicing, collections follow-up, and cash application.
- Run payroll and all related compliance, including job-costed labor allocation.
- Deliver a clean, accurate, on-time financial package every month.
Job costing and construction-specific accounting
- Build and maintain cost code structures that fit each client's business, and categorize transactions to those codes accurately and consistently.
- Ensure COGS is coded correctly and job-level margin is real — not a plug.
- Set up and manage cost-plus billing: track actual costs against contracts, calculate and invoice markup/fee correctly, and support open-book reviews with the client's customers.
- Use QuickBooks Online Advanced and its project tracking tools as the core of job-level reporting. You should know Projects, custom roles, custom fields, workflows, and Advanced reporting well.
- Produce job cost reports, WIP schedules, and job profitability analysis that the owner and PMs can actually use.
Systems, integrations, and data integrity
- Our clients run construction and field service project management platforms alongside QBO — BuilderTrend, JobTread, Procore, Jobber, Housecall Pro, Houzz Pro, D-Tools, ServiceTitan, and others.
- You are responsible for connecting these systems to QBO, configuring the sync correctly, and keeping the data consistent across both platforms. When the PM system and the GL disagree, you find out why and fix it.
- You'll troubleshoot mapping issues, duplicate entries, failed syncs, and structural mismatches between how the field tracks work and how accounting needs to see it.
Onboarding and cleanup
- New clients rarely arrive with clean books. You will diagnose what's wrong, scope the cleanup, and execute it — reconstructing reconciliations, correcting misclassified costs, rebuilding the chart of accounts and cost code structure, and resolving prior-period messes.
- Migrate incoming clients onto our preferred tech stack (QBO Advanced, Ramp, Bill.com, Gusto) and their project management platform integration, with minimal disruption to the client's operations.
Advisory and financial leadership
- Build budgets and rolling forecasts, and run cash flow forecasting so owners can see what's coming.
- Analyze job-level and company-level performance, identify margin erosion, pricing problems, overhead creep, and cash timing risk.
- Proactively surface issues and bring solutions. We do not want a controller who reports that margins fell. We want one who explains why, what it will cost if it continues, and what to do about it — before the owner asks.
- Meet with clients regularly, present financials in plain language, and be the person they call before making a big decision.
Who Is a Good Fit
You are likely a strong fit if:
- You have deep, hands-on construction or trades accounting experience and have personally run a company's books from bank feed to financial statements.
- You are fluent in job costing, cost codes, WIP, retainage, and cost-plus contracts — and you can explain them to a non-financial owner.
- You are an advanced QuickBooks Online user who has configured, cleaned up, and rebuilt files, not just entered transactions into one.
- You are comfortable being the only accountant in the room. You'd rather do the work correctly yourself than chase someone else's.
- You are curious about how the business actually operates — you'll ask why a job lost money, not just record that it did.
- You are organized enough to juggle multiple client businesses, each with different systems, deadlines, and personalities, without dropping details.
- You genuinely enjoy client relationships and can hold a direct conversation with an owner about something that isn't going well.
- You are resourceful with technology and comfortable troubleshooting integrations between systems.
Who Is Not a Good Fit
To save everyone time, this role is probably not for you if:
- You are looking for a management role. There is no team under you.
- Your recent experience is primarily reviewing, supervising, or approving work performed by staff accountants or bookkeepers.
- You've worked in construction accounting only within a large ERP environment (Sage 300 CRE, Viewpoint, CMiC) and have not worked hands-on in QuickBooks Online.
- You want to work on a single company's books with predictable rhythms. Multi-client work means competing deadlines and constant context switching.
- You prefer to stay behind the numbers and let someone else handle the client conversations.
- You need fully documented, stable processes to be productive. Cleanup work is inherently ambiguous, and you'll often be the one creating the process.
- You are looking primarily for audit, tax, or technical accounting research work.
Qualifications
Required
- 5+ years of hands-on accounting experience, with significant time in construction, trades, or project-based businesses.
- Demonstrated ability to run a company's entire accounting cycle independently — AP, AR, payroll, bookkeeping, reconciliations, close, and reporting.
- Advanced proficiency with QuickBooks Online, including QBO Advanced and Projects/job costing functionality.
- Working knowledge of job costing, cost code structures, COGS classification, and cost-plus contract accounting.
- Strong Excel/Google Sheets skills, including pivot tables, lookups, and building analysis from raw exports.
- Solid command of GAAP as it applies to small and mid-sized construction businesses (revenue recognition, percentage of completion vs. completed contract, WIP).
- Excellent written and verbal communication — you'll be presenting to business owners regularly.
Preferred
- Experience in an outsourced accounting, fractional CFO, or multi-client environment.
- Hands-on experience with Ramp, Bill.com, and Gusto.
- Direct experience integrating QBO with one or more of: BuilderTrend, JobTread, Procore, Jobber, Housecall Pro, Houzz Pro, D-Tools, ServiceTitan.
- Experience performing books cleanup, file rebuilds, or platform migrations.
- Bachelor's degree in Accounting or Finance, and/or CPA/CMA. We weight demonstrated hands-on capability more heavily than credentials — if you can do the work, we want to talk to you.
Why This Role Matters
Most businesses in the $2M–$10M range have never had a real financial leader. They have a tax preparer and a shoebox. When you do this job well, an owner finally knows which jobs make money, which customers to stop taking, and whether they can afford to hire. That's the impact we're hiring for.
Pay: $100,000.00 - $125,000.00 per year
Benefits:
- Health insurance
- Paid time off
- Profit sharing
- Work from home
Experience:
- Construction Accounting: 5 years (Preferred)
- Controller: 3 years (Preferred)
- QuickBooks Online: 5 years (Preferred)
Work Location: Remote
