You want somebody this month, not another stack of logins, and you want last month finished before the tenth gets away from you. That's a completely reasonable thing to be shopping for.
Companies start looking when the work has outgrown the owner and hasn't yet grown into a department. There's nothing premature about it. It's the normal size at which somebody has to take the books off your evenings.
What usually disappoints is a logo and a portal, and still nobody who will say out loud whether last month is true.
A page by the tenth with the month closed on it, the return built from those same books, and owner pay decided before the return gets drafted rather than after.
Your own figures stay off anything published here. What you see above is the shape of the page, not somebody else's year.
In a company big enough to have a finance department, the CFO sits at the top of it and the controller, the bookkeepers and any CPAs on staff report up to that seat. An owner out looking for an outsourced accountant is usually shopping one level below the seat that would actually settle the year. 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 Texas filings and the return coming out of this one chair, so a category chosen in March still makes sense in April. Height is the October row, read from the top of that drawing while the year can still move. Businesses don't hire a CPA. They hire a CFO.
Picture a Texas owner whose preparer stopped answering in February. January was the last month anybody tied to the bank, and draws had landed in three different places because no rule was being watched.
The first page for that file would name one person, a first close on the coming tenth, and one place where those draws finally sit together. October gets a circle. No company name, and no saved tax quoted.
Closing a month and preparing a return is ordinary work, and the person in this chair holds no CPA license. Signed audits, reviews, compilations and assurance reports stay with a firm that holds one, and that gets named before anybody discusses a start date.
Payday can be set up from this chair and is run by you on a provider you own. Nobody here stands in for you in an examination. The rest of it is written out on the disclosures page.
Source. The holding-out and reports rules at Texas Occupations Code sections 901.451, 901.453 and 901.456, read 29 September 2026 for a chair that starts inside this month.
A sentence is enough. You will be talking to the Steven Palmieri practice.
You will be talking to the Steven Palmieri practice.