Services
Full controller and CFO capability, embedded in your team.
Not advice delivered from the outside — the work itself, done inside your systems on a steady cadence.
Core capabilities
Most engagements start with two or three of these and grow into the rest as the books stabilize.
- 01External and internal financial reporting and monthly close
- 02Accounting system selection, conversion, and implementation leadership
- 03Treasury management, daily cash oversight, and 13-week cash forecasting
- 04Multi-entity consolidation, complex ownership structures, audit readiness
- 05Budgeting, forecasting, and budget-to-actual variance analysis
- 06Capital project, AFE, development cost, and job cost oversight
- 07Year-end packages and workpapers for your outside tax preparers
- 08Building, training, and leading accounting teams across departments
- 09Technical accounting — ASC 606, ASC 842, embedded derivatives, warrants
Engagement shapes
Three ways this usually starts
Fractional controller or CFO
The standard arrangement. A recurring monthly commitment covering close, reporting, cash, and whatever the month actually demands. Year-round, so year-end is a continuation rather than an event.
A defined piece of work
A system implementation, an audit readiness push, a consolidation rebuild, a clean-up before a transaction or a financing. Fixed scope, clear finish line, and a handoff your team can carry.
Covering a gap
Your controller left, the close is slipping, and a permanent hire is months away. I step into the seat, keep the reporting moving, and help you hire the right replacement rather than the available one.
System selection & conversion
When you've outgrown your accounting system
It usually starts the same way. The file is slow, two people can't work in it at once, the entities have multiplied past what the structure was built to carry, and nobody wants to own the decision about what comes next.
I've run that migration at every scale. A ten-entity QuickBooks Online to Xero conversion is underway right now. Before it: QuickBooks Desktop to Online for a homebuilder, NetSuite implementations at two companies scaling past 100 employees, Coupa and the Quorum suite in midstream energy, and a Hyperion Financial Management rollout where I trained 25 users.
The hard part was never the software. It's the chart of accounts you'll live with for the next decade, the opening balances that have to tie, the parallel period nobody wants to run, and the training that decides whether the new system actually gets used or quietly worked around.
Choosing well
Requirements from how the business actually operates, not a feature grid. The cheapest system you'll outgrow in two years isn't cheap.
Landing it
Chart of accounts design, entity structure, opening balances, data conversion, and a cutover that doesn't strand a close mid-month.
Making it stick
Documented procedures and trained staff, so the system is used as designed rather than routed around by month three.
Systems & platforms
I work in your stack, not mine
Day-to-day operation as well as selection and implementation — including the energy and construction systems that general-practice firms rarely touch.
Accounting & ERP
NetSuite · Oracle · Sage · PeopleSoft · QuickBooks Online · Xero
Energy & Capital Projects
Quorum suite (TIPS, PGAS, QROW, QCFS) · Solarc Right Angle · Coupa
Real Estate & Construction
AppFolio · RealPage · Premier
Consolidation, Planning & Spend
Hyperion HFM · Essbase · Vena · Cube · Ramp · Expensify · Clockify
The part that actually matters
The work is year-round, which is the whole point.
Most finance problems don't show up in the month they're created. They show up in January, when someone finally needs a number the books were never set up to produce, and the fix costs ten times what it would have cost in July.
So I work on a steady cadence all year — the same close, the same reporting, the same cash discipline in a quiet August as in a loud February. Nothing accumulates. By the time year-end arrives, it's a continuation rather than an event, and everything anyone downstream needs is already tied out and waiting.
If your books are technically fine but nobody quite trusts them, let's talk.
A first conversation is a straightforward one: what you have now, what people keep asking you for, and where the gap is. No pitch deck.
Email stuart@slwservices.co See how engagements start