Working across the Texaplex with one practice
My company is in Houston and Austin. Can one practice in Dallas keep up?
Looking for a fractional CFO who can work across the Texaplex? The word means Dallas and Fort Worth, Houston, San Antonio and Austin, the four places that hold most of the state's people and business. Steven Palmieri is a Tax CFO whose practice is in Dallas. That is not on your street, and we say so. A company with two or three of those cities in it does not need two or three advisors. It needs one set of books that knows where everything is.
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One state, one rulebook
The advantage of working across the state is that the rules are shared. A single Comptroller collects sales tax and franchise reports from the Panhandle to the Gulf, and one Central Time clock sets the cutoff for a large electronic payment wherever the company sits. We keep the Texas calendar for our own practice, so yours is not foreign to us. What changes between cities is local, such as the sales tax pieces and the appraisal district, and we track those by address.
How the work runs across cities
The books live in QuickBooks Online, with bank and card feeds. Every sale, cost, asset and payroll line carries a location tag, so the company can be read as a whole or one place at a time. One monthly close covers every location. A monthly video meeting goes through the close and the one decision for the month, and a calendar link sets the time. Between meetings, questions go in writing, in the same file.
See how locations get tagged
A few reasons distance does not matter
The first reason is the simplest. What makes the work good is how well a person knows your numbers. Miles do not enter into it.
The second is what closeness used to buy. A drop-off point for receipts, a signing table and someone to run papers to the bank. Receipts get photographed, signatures come in on a phone, and bank feeds arrive overnight. Nearness today buys a handshake and a parking space, which is pleasant and does not close a month.
The third is a company that spans cities. A nearby advisor is near only one of them. Houston is about 223 miles from Dallas, Austin about 182 and San Antonio about 253, but a company with locations in two of them is far from a neighborhood firm in at least one. A video call is the same distance from every location.
The trade, plainly
You give up the table in your own office, and some owners miss it. We will not call it nothing.
You gain one practice and one set of books, in place of a different advisor in every city. You gain a monthly meeting that happens because it is easy to keep. And you gain a plan that sees the company as a whole, which is hard to do when the pieces sit with different people.
The Texaplex, and the places outside it
The Texaplex is the triangle of cities we named, with Dallas and Fort Worth counted together. Amarillo, Lubbock, El Paso and Midland sit outside it, and we never call them part of it. We work with owners there the same way, by video, with the same Texas rules. The word only describes where most of the state's business happens, and it has no bearing on how well the work can be done.
On the Texas calendar
The date this page puts on your plan is the 20th, the day each location's sales tax return comes due, with every one of them fed from a single monthly close.
