Most contractors I talk to have a pretty good handle on their field operations. They know their crews, they know their equipment, and they know how to build. Where things get murky is on the financial side — and specifically, who's actually responsible for making sure the numbers are right.
There's a role that tends to get overlooked until a company hits a wall: the construction controller. Not a bookkeeper, not just an accountant — something more, and frankly one of the most valuable hires a growing contractor can make.
So what does a controller actually do?
The short answer is they run your accounting department. But that undersells it. A good controller isn't just making sure invoices get paid and bank accounts get reconciled. They're managing the systems and people that produce your financial information — and in construction, that information is everything.
Job costing--including labor, materials, indirect costs, and equipment--is the obvious one. If your costs aren't being allocated correctly by job, phase, and cost code, your WIP report is fiction. And if your WIP is wrong, your financials are wrong, your bonding capacity is wrong, and your decisions about which work to bid are based on a guess. It cascades fast. The controller is the one who makes sure that doesn't happen. And not every person with the title actually understands construction.
Beyond job costing, they're responsible for your monthly financial statements, cash flow projections, and budget-to-actual reporting. On the compliance side — certified payroll, lien waivers, retainage tracking, GAAP reporting — that's on them too. And internally, they're building the controls that keep errors (and worse) from slipping through: approval workflows, reconciliation schedules, segregation of duties.
For most contractors without a dedicated financial leader, the controller essentially becomes that person. They're the one you're going to when you need to understand why cash is tight, whether a project is actually profitable, or what your numbers look like ahead of a bonding renewal.
How is a controller different from a bookkeeper or accountant?
A bookkeeper handles data entry. They're reactive and transactional — recording what happened, not interpreting it. That's useful, but it's a starting point, not a financial function.
An accountant steps up from that. They can prepare financials, handle compliance work, and bring more judgment to the process. But a controller takes ownership of the entire function — the processes, the people, the reporting, and the accuracy of everything that comes out of your accounting department.
The difference you'll feel in practice: a bookkeeper tells you what the numbers say. A controller tells you what they mean and catches problems before they show up on a bank statement.
When does a contractor actually need one?
Not on day one. The real signals are operational. Are you running multiple projects at once and struggling to know which ones are making money? Are your financial reports consistently late or inconsistent? Do your project managers have no visibility into their job costs? Are you regularly surprised by cash flow problems that should have been visible weeks earlier?
For most contractors, those questions start getting uncomfortable somewhere around $5–10M in revenue — but the number isn't the point. The point is whether your financial operations can actually keep up with your business. Plenty of contractors at $8M are running lean and doing fine. Others at $4M are already drowning in financial chaos. You know which one you are.
What to look for when you hire
Construction accounting is its own discipline, and that matters when you're hiring. Someone with a strong general accounting background but no construction experience will spend their first year figuring out what a schedule of values is. You want someone who already knows job costing, WIP reporting, percentage-of-completion revenue recognition, and ideally your software — whether that's Sage, ComputerEase, Foundation, Viewpoint, or something else.
The technical piece is table stakes. What separates a good controller from a great one is communication. They're going to be translating financial data for project managers, ownership, and sometimes your surety or bank. If they can't walk a project manager through a WIP report in plain language, the information stops being useful the moment it leaves their desk.
The bottom line
A controller won't win you projects or manage your crews. But they'll make sure you actually know whether your business is profitable, that cash flow problems don't blindside you, and that when bonding, banking, or a big bid opportunity comes up, your financial house is in order.
For a contractor who's been running without dedicated financial leadership, bringing on a controller isn't just an accounting hire. It's the thing that lets you make real decisions instead of educated guesses. And for some contractors, hiring internally isn't the only path.