Every firm you talk to will describe the relationship. Far fewer will describe the first month, and that gap is the most useful thing on the table.
Relationships are easy to describe and impossible to compare. A first month is specific. It either ends with something in your hands or it ends with a login.
So there is one question worth putting to every firm on your list. What will exist at the end of the first month that does not exist today?
Where the books actually stand, said plainly instead of diplomatically. What your cash is going to do over the next stretch. Whether the file you have would survive a lender reading it. And what the autumn conversation is going to be about.
A firm that can answer all four before you sign has done this work before. One that cannot is planning to find out on your time and your money.
Sometimes it means the first month is honestly a discovery exercise, which is fine so long as somebody says so out loud and prices it that way.
More often it means the first month has no shape at all. What arrives is onboarding, a portal login, and a call six weeks later to say the books were worse than expected. You knew that part already.
What you are really testing is whether the person in front of you has closed a month lately. People who have will reach for specifics without being prompted, because specifics are where their week goes.
People who have not will keep returning to the team, the process and the technology, because that is the part they can describe.
Those four answers in writing before anything is signed, with an honest note against any of them that needs a week of looking first.
The rows above show the shape of a first month. Nobody's real figures sit on them.
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.
Breadth is why the close row and the lender row can come from the same person, because the books, the filings and the return are kept in one place and nothing has to be chased down.
Height is the October row, the only one of the four that is about what happens next instead of what is true now.
I was comparing firms on price and headcount. What I actually wanted was to know what the first month would put in my hands.
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.