You are shopping a category where everybody's website says the same six words. The question that separates them is simple and almost nobody asks it, which is what lands on your desk in the first month.
Shopping the label is normal, and the work hides inside the label. You are allowed to ask a firm to describe month one out loud, in plain words, before anybody writes you a document.
If a firm cannot do that without a slide deck, the logo is doing too much of the talking. It is not a trick question and it does not need a meeting to answer.
Under the shopping words it is a close they can read, a forward look at cash, a file a lender will accept, or a year that gets decided before it ends. Sometimes all four, usually one of them first.
The strip below is a first month with the rows named and the figures left blank, because the figures are yours. It is the thing to hold a proposal up against.
The limit on any of it sits in the short section underneath, which is also something worth hearing in month one rather than after a document arrives.
Not hours, and not a title on a slide. 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. Businesses don't hire a CPA. They hire a CFO.
Breadth is the reason month one is worth anything, because the person closing the books is the one who will file the return they feed. Height is the part you cannot get from a bookkeeper at any price, which is a read of the year early enough to act on.
Comparing firms is ordinary, and nothing on this site implies a CPA credential. A firm that holds one remains the right call for an audit, a review, a compilation or an assurance opinion, and this desk holds none. That limit belongs in month one, not after a proposal has already been written. The complete wording sits on the disclosures page.
Source. Texas Occupations Code, section 901.451, section 901.453 and section 901.456. Read at statutes.capitol.texas.gov on 29 September 2026.
Twenty minutes, and you describe the month you want closed first. You leave with a straight description of what month one would contain, which you can then put next to anybody else's proposal.
You will be talking to the Steven Palmieri practice. A sentence about the spoken answer is enough to start.
You will be talking to the Steven Palmieri practice.