I-30 takes enough of your week. A bookkeeper near Arlington should give some of it back.
Arlington began in 1876 as the market town on the railroad between Dallas and Fort Worth, and the middle has been its address ever since. We close your month, reconcile every account, and pick up when you call. It starts with a free review of your QuickBooks® file.
The town the road was built through
The turnpike between Dallas and Fort Worth opened in 1957 and took thirty minutes off the trip, and Arlington has lived inside that convenience ever since. Sitting in the middle is good for business and brutal on a calendar.
The windshield takes the hours
Between a job on the Dallas end and a supplier out toward Fort Worth, the driving is the part of the day nobody invoices, and the books slide to whenever you get home.
The month never quite closes
You mean to reconcile on Sunday, and then Monday arrives with a truck to load and a customer who wants an answer before lunch, and the pile gains another week.
Nobody reads it back to you
The report says one thing, the bank says another, and whoever built the file has never once walked you through the difference. A free review is where somebody finally does.
How this starts for an Arlington owner
Nobody quotes a monthly fee here before the QuickBooks file has been opened and read. That reading is the free review, and it happens before any number is said out loud.
The free file review
Someone opens your QuickBooks Online company, measures the balances against the statements, and says in ordinary language how far the books have drifted and how far back a rebuild has to reach.
A scope with your name on it
You get the open periods listed, the bank and card accounts named, the monthly cadence described and the fee attached to all of it, before anybody moves a single transaction.
A month that actually closes
Reconciliation on a calendar, the period finished and locked, and a written recap naming what moved, what looked strange and the one thing still waiting on you.
If that review leaves you no clearer about where the books stand, there is no charge for it and no follow up you have to sit through.
We are not on your street in Arlington
Here is the part most pages like this one save until after you have filled in the form. There is no lobby of ours in downtown Arlington and no door of ours to unlock near the campus at seven in the morning. Steven Palmieri works from Texas, for owners all over the country, and a fair number of them run businesses within a short drive of the I-30 corridor you use every day.
Said out loud, that stops being a problem. What you actually wanted when you typed those words was a person who picks up, a file that gets closed on schedule, and somebody who had heard of the Tarrant Appraisal District before you had to explain it. A street address delivers none of that. One person owning your file from the first review through every month after it delivers all of it.
What Texas does buy you shows up the week a deadline lands. Your filings, your appraisal notices and the tax you collect all run on the same state calendar ours does, so nobody here is reading up on your state on the afternoon you need the answer. And when a conversation belongs at a table instead of on a screen, the Metroplex is an easy drive and we will make it.
Start with the free review of the QuickBooks file and you can test every word of this for nothing.
The Texas rules that land on an Arlington desk
Texas is generous in one direction and exacting in the other, and owners here feel both. Nobody pays a state income tax on the money the business made, which is half the reason people move companies across a state line to get here. What sits in its place is the franchise report the Comptroller expects every May, filed whether the year was fat or thin and whether anything is owed at all. A company that never filed one is usually a company that never knew it existed.
Then comes property, which in this county means the Tarrant Appraisal District. If the business owns equipment, furniture, vehicles or inventory, a rendition of that business personal property is due in April, and the value that lands on the roll follows either what you reported or what the district assumed while you said nothing. A fixed asset list that agrees with your books is the whole difference between a rendition you can defend and a number somebody else picked for you.
Sales tax is the one that bites hardest around here, because the local piece of the rate follows where the sale is sourced, and the city lines in this part of Tarrant County sit close enough together to cross twice in a morning. Two jobs a few miles apart can carry different local rates in the same invoice week.
All of it gets read during the free review, before anybody quotes you anything.
How the remote part turns into an advantage
You keep the QuickBooks Online company in your own name and add us to it the way you would add anyone else, and you can withdraw that access in about a minute whenever you like. Bank and card feeds get connected so the raw activity arrives without you exporting a thing, and statements, loan papers and closing documents travel across a secure document link instead of sitting in an inbox.
That arrangement does something a lobby cannot. Your file is open to the person working it every day of the month, rather than on the afternoon you remembered to drop off a folder, so a question about a deposit gets asked while the deposit is still fresh in your memory. Nothing sits in a tray waiting for somebody to get back from lunch.
One period gets finished and locked before the next one is opened, so at any hour there is exactly one month in question and you know which one it is. You hear from us only on the lines where your memory is the only record, since an owner draw and a hardware run leave the same footprint in a bank feed.
Every close ends in a written recap short enough to finish at a red light, and when a conversation would do more good than a document, we book a time and meet somewhere around the Metroplex.
Ask for the free review. It is the smallest step available and it asks nothing of you but the form below.
Ask for the free file review
Say what shape the books are in and what is coming up on the calendar. A reply reaches you inside one business day.
Questions from Arlington owners
Do you meet in person around Arlington?
By appointment, yes. There is no waiting room for you to sit in, so a first meeting happens at your place of business or somewhere your day already takes you. After that, most owners run the monthly work by screen share and keep the drive for the conversations that earn it.
When is the Texas franchise report due?
The Comptroller expects an annual report in May from taxable entities, and the obligation survives a year in which nothing is owed. It has to be built on books that agree with the bank, which is why a monthly close matters long before May shows up.
What is the April rendition in Tarrant County?
If the business owns equipment, inventory, vehicles or furniture, the Tarrant Appraisal District expects a rendition of that business personal property in April. A fixed asset schedule kept current inside QuickBooks turns that filing into a short errand instead of an argument over a value somebody else assigned.
Does no state income tax mean less bookkeeping?
It means one fewer return and higher stakes on the federal one. There is no state filing standing by to catch a misclassification, so whatever the books say in the spring is what gets filed. Monthly reconciliation is the only check left in the system.
How do you handle sales tax across city lines?
What was collected gets recorded by location, and each filing gets traced to the payment that actually cleared the bank, so the liability account stops being a guess. Where the rate itself is arguable, you get told before the return goes out rather than after.
What do you need to start the free review?
An accountant invite to the QuickBooks Online company, or read only access, plus whatever you can tell us about how far back the gaps go. One short conversation covers the rest, and nothing is quoted before the file has been read.