The Outsourced Finance Desk exists for one moment, the handover. Providers sound alike until the handover is written down.
In a company big enough to have a finance department, the CFO is the top of it. The controller reports up to that seat, and so do the bookkeepers, the accountants and any CPAs on the staff. An owner shopping for an outsourced desk is usually looking a level or two below the seat that would answer the questions the handover raises.
That top seat, at owner scale, is what this desk calls a Tax CFO. A Tax CFO is the controller and CFO seat for an owner run business with the tax work inside it, so the books, the return and the plan come from one desk and the October number is decided before the year ends. Breadth is the books, the filings, the return and the plan moving as one handover, which is the sequence set out above. Height is the view from the top of the pyramid below, where the year is decided rather than reported back to you in March.
The way companies staff says the same thing. Read what a business posts when it wants somebody over the numbers. Businesses don't hire a CPA. They hire a CFO. The licence is carried by a person on the team and it is the right qualification for the work reserved to it. The chair is what a business hires.
People arrive after a bookkeeper has left, or is about to. They want the file to keep closing. The useful object is a sequence. Access, a read of the file as it stands, catch-up if months are open, a first month that ties, then a list of what the owner still does.
No fee is on this page. The number comes from the drivers, on a call, after the handover is the thing being priced.
Who closes the month, and where do they sit. What is never sent to a third party. What you still have to send, and when. What you can take if you leave. Whether the return is prepared from this close or handed to someone else. Whether a controller's tasks are in the month or not.
Take the list to any other desk. A desk that cannot answer it has not published a handover.
A signed report on your financial statements, which is to say an audit, a review or a compilation. Texas keeps that work for firms holding the licence and this desk holds none, so if a lender or a buyer has asked for one you will hear it in the first few minutes and leave with the name of somebody who can sign it. The close, the catch-up, the filings and the return all sit outside that reserved list, which is why the handover is as long as it is, and the rest of what this desk leaves alone is set out on the disclosures page.
A handover that stops at data entry leaves March to someone who never saw the month. The close here is built so a return can be prepared from it, by this desk or handed to a preparer you already have, as a package rather than a scramble.
The work stays in Dallas with Steven Palmieri. Offshore never receives the file. Two handovers can be compared without anyone visiting an office.
No rate is printed. Account count, volume, payroll setup, entities, months behind, and whether the return is inside the engagement are the drivers. The number is said on the call.
Steven Palmieri, in Dallas. The who-does-the-work page says what is never subcontracted.
Catch-up stays a separate scope, named after the file is read.
The books and the exports are yours. The exit page says what you take. The engagement letter itself is not quoted here.
The split is tasks. Reconciliations are one job. Review, accruals, and a monthly read of the numbers are another. The controller page keeps them apart.
That list is the line-drawing section above, said once. Most of a handover sits outside it. A later page stays with the sort.
I want the handover written down before the file moves. The plan names the sequence for these accounts. The number follows the drivers, and this page leaves the number off.
You will be talking to the Steven Palmieri practice.