Outsourced CFO & Accounting Services in Arlington
Financial leadership built for the entertainment and industrial heart of North Texas. Expert outsourced finance for venue operators, automotive manufacturers, defense subcontractors, and healthcare providers navigating event-driven revenue cycles, OEM supply chain demands, and a Texas tax environment that is far more complex than the "no income tax" headline suggests.
The Arlington Business Landscape
Arlington sits at the geographic and economic center of the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex, a city of nearly 400,000 people that has carved out an identity entirely distinct from its two larger neighbors. While Dallas anchors the region's financial services and corporate headquarters economy, and Fort Worth claims defense and energy, Arlington has become the entertainment capital of Texas—and a quiet industrial powerhouse that most outsiders overlook. AT&T Stadium, home of the Dallas Cowboys, draws more than four million visitors per year. Globe Life Field hosts the Texas Rangers across a full Major League Baseball season. Six Flags Over Texas and Hurricane Harbor add another three million annual visitors. The combined economic impact of these venues exceeds $2.5 billion annually, supporting thousands of businesses that provide catering, security, parking, maintenance, hospitality, and event logistics services.
But the entertainment economy is only part of the story. General Motors operates its Arlington Assembly Plant here, one of the most productive facilities in GM's North American network. The plant produces the Chevrolet Tahoe, Chevrolet Suburban, GMC Yukon, and Cadillac Escalade—some of the highest-margin vehicles in GM's lineup—and employs over 5,000 workers across multiple shifts. That production volume creates a ripple effect through the local economy: Tier 1 and Tier 2 suppliers, logistics providers, tool and die shops, and maintenance contractors all depend on the assembly plant for revenue. Meanwhile, Arlington's proximity to Fort Worth's defense corridor, anchored by Lockheed Martin's F-35 program and Bell's helicopter operations, pulls defense subcontracting work into the mid-cities. Texas Health Arlington Memorial Hospital and Medical City Arlington lead a healthcare sector that is expanding rapidly to serve the DFW metroplex's growing population.
For business owners managing $5M to $50M in revenue, Arlington creates a distinctive combination of opportunities and financial management challenges. The event-driven revenue patterns of the entertainment economy require cash flow planning that most accounting firms are not equipped to deliver. Automotive supply chain economics demand precise job costing and working capital management across extended payment cycles. Defense compliance obligations add layers of accounting complexity that are non-negotiable. And Texas's tax structure, while favorable in headline terms, creates real traps for growing companies that do not manage it proactively.
$2.5B+ Annual
Economic Impact
Entertainment & sports venues
GM Assembly Plant
5,000+ Workers
Full-size SUV production hub
~400,000
Population
7th largest city in Texas
Managing the Volatility of Event-Driven Revenue
Arlington's entertainment venues create a revenue pattern that is fundamentally unlike what businesses experience in most American cities. A Cowboys home game at AT&T Stadium produces an intense, concentrated burst of economic activity—tens of thousands of meals served, hundreds of security and parking personnel deployed, facilities maintenance crews working overtime—and then the revenue stops until the next event. The Rangers' 81-game home schedule at Globe Life Field provides a steadier drumbeat from April through September, but the October-to-March off-season leaves hospitality businesses facing six months of dramatically reduced venue-related demand. Six Flags operates on a seasonal calendar that runs roughly March through late November, with weekend-only periods in the shoulder months that make staffing and inventory planning particularly difficult.
For a catering company, facilities maintenance firm, or event services provider generating $5M to $25M in revenue, this volatility creates a cash flow management problem that requires genuinely sophisticated financial planning. Fixed costs—facility leases, vehicle payments, insurance premiums, core management salaries—continue through quiet periods regardless of revenue. A business that deploys 250 staff during a Cowboys game week and 40 staff during a dark week must maintain the capacity to surge while managing the cost of carrying that capacity when it sits idle. Building enough cash reserves during peak periods to cover three to five months of reduced revenue requires disciplined forecasting that incorporates venue event calendars, historical attendance patterns, weather-adjusted demand projections, and contingency buffers for cancellations or schedule changes.
Pricing strategy in this environment is equally complex. You cannot simply divide your annual costs by your annual revenue days and set prices accordingly, because a Cowboys game generates fundamentally different revenue density than a mid-week Rangers game in June. Premium events—playoff games, concerts, major conventions—command pricing power that regular events do not, and capturing that premium requires dynamic pricing models that account for event type, expected attendance, and competitive alternatives. A finance partner who does not understand how Arlington's venue calendar drives cash flow will build thirteen-week forecasts based on steady-state assumptions that bear no relationship to reality—and in a seasonal business, inaccurate cash flow forecasting is the single most common path to financial distress.
Automotive Manufacturing and the OEM Supply Chain
The General Motors Arlington Assembly Plant is not merely a large employer—it is the gravitational center of a manufacturing ecosystem that extends across the mid-cities. The plant's production of GM's full-size SUV platform represents billions of dollars in annual output, and the just-in-time delivery model that governs modern automotive manufacturing means that dozens of local suppliers operate on production schedules dictated entirely by GM's assembly line. A stamped metal components supplier, a wire harness manufacturer, or a packaging materials company in the GM supply chain does not set its own production calendar. GM does. And GM's expectations for delivery reliability, quality consistency, and cost discipline are demanding.
The financial implications of OEM supply chain membership are substantial. Payment terms from automotive OEMs typically run net-60 to net-90, which means a supplier shipping $800,000 in components per month is carrying $1.6 million to $2.4 million in outstanding receivables at any given time. Meanwhile, raw material purchases, labor costs, and overhead expenses must be paid on normal business timelines—net-30 for materials, biweekly for payroll, monthly for facility costs. The gap between when costs are incurred and when revenue is collected creates a permanent working capital requirement that must be financed. Undersizing your credit facility relative to your receivables cycle means you will hit cash crunches during production surges; oversizing it means you are paying interest on capacity you do not use. Getting the balance right requires financial modeling that is tuned to your specific production volume, payment terms, and seasonal patterns.
Cost accounting in automotive supply chain manufacturing must be precise because margins are thin and non-negotiable. OEM buyers conduct detailed cost breakdowns during contract negotiations, and your quoted pricing must reflect actual material costs, labor rates, overhead allocations, and profit margins that are defensible under scrutiny. If your cost accounting system cannot produce accurate per-unit cost data broken down by material, direct labor, and overhead, you will either underprice and erode margins or overprice and lose the contract to a competitor. Quality failures generate chargebacks that come directly off your revenue. Late deliveries trigger penalties that can wipe out project profitability. Finance leadership that understands manufacturing cost structures—standard costing, variance analysis, scrap rate tracking, and capacity utilization metrics—is essential for any company that depends on GM or similar OEM contracts for a significant share of revenue.
Defense Subcontracting Across the Mid-Cities
Arlington's position between Dallas and Fort Worth places it within easy reach of one of the largest concentrations of defense spending in the United States. Lockheed Martin's Aeronautics division, headquartered in Fort Worth, produces the F-35 Lightning II—a program valued at over $1.7 trillion across its lifetime. Bell, also in Fort Worth, manufactures the V-22 Osprey tiltrotor and the upcoming V-280 Valor for the Army's Future Long-Range Assault Aircraft program. L3Harris Technologies, Elbit Systems of America, and Northrop Grumman all maintain significant DFW-area operations. The scale of these prime contractor programs generates billions in subcontracting opportunities for mid-market companies providing engineering services, IT support, component fabrication, logistics, and facility maintenance.
For an Arlington-based company holding or pursuing defense subcontracts in the $5M to $30M range, the compliance infrastructure required is substantial. DCAA compliance demands cost accounting systems that segregate direct costs by contract, compute indirect rates (fringe benefits, overhead, and general and administrative expense) consistently across all work, and produce auditable incurred cost submissions annually. Companies handling defense technical data must comply with ITAR export control regulations. The emerging CMMC cybersecurity framework imposes IT security requirements that can cost $100,000 or more to implement. Each of these obligations carries real consequences for non-compliance: DCAA audit findings can trigger repayment demands and contract termination, ITAR violations can result in criminal penalties, and CMMC non-compliance will disqualify companies from contract eligibility.
The financial challenge extends beyond compliance mechanics. Companies that mix government and commercial work—as many mid-market defense subcontractors do—must maintain parallel accounting structures that keep government cost accounting cleanly separated from commercial operations. Forward pricing proposals require detailed cost estimates built from historical data, labor rate projections, and indirect rate forecasts that government auditors will compare to actual performance. Indirect rate management is a strategic exercise: setting rates too high makes your proposals uncompetitive, while setting them too low means you fail to recover your actual overhead and lose money on every contract dollar. An outsourced finance team with defense contracting experience can manage these complexities without the $130,000 to $170,000 annual cost of hiring a dedicated government accounting specialist at DFW salary levels.
Texas Tax Strategy: Beyond the "No Income Tax" Headline
Texas's lack of a personal income tax is one of the most effective business recruitment tools in the country, and it is a genuine advantage for business owners who relocate from high-tax states. But business owners who stop at the headline miss the substantial tax obligations that Texas imposes through other mechanisms. The Texas franchise tax, formally called the margin tax, applies to all businesses with total revenue exceeding $2.47 million. The tax can be computed using four different methods: total revenue minus cost of goods sold, total revenue minus compensation, total revenue multiplied by 70%, or an EZ computation method. The optimal method depends entirely on your specific cost structure, and the difference between the best and worst choice can amount to tens of thousands of dollars for a company generating $10 million to $30 million in revenue.
For Arlington businesses operating across multiple entities—a manufacturing company paired with a real estate holding entity, or an event services firm combined with an equipment leasing company—the franchise tax calculation must be evaluated for each entity independently. Some entities benefit from the COGS deduction, others from the compensation deduction, and the choice should be reassessed annually as the company's revenue and cost profile evolves. Entity structuring decisions that were optimal when a business was generating $3 million in revenue may become suboptimal at $12 million, but many business owners never revisit these structures because their accounting firm treats entity decisions as a one-time setup exercise rather than an ongoing strategic question.
Property tax is the other pillar of Texas's revenue system, and it is where the tax burden becomes genuinely heavy. Tarrant County, where Arlington is located, assesses commercial property tax at effective rates of 2.3% to 2.8% of appraised value. For a manufacturing company with a facility and equipment yard appraised at $4 million, annual property tax can exceed $100,000. For a restaurant group operating under triple-net leases where property tax is passed through by the landlord, property tax exposure is embedded in occupancy costs at every location. Protesting assessed values is not optional in this environment—it is a core financial management activity. Companies that fail to protest consistently overpay relative to neighbors who do, and the cumulative cost over five to ten years can be hundreds of thousands of dollars. A finance partner that manages the full Texas tax picture—franchise tax method optimization, entity structure evaluation, property tax protests, and sales tax compliance—protects margins that would otherwise erode silently.
Healthcare Expansion in a Growing Metroplex
The DFW metroplex has added more than 1.5 million residents over the past decade, and that population growth has created healthcare demand that consistently outpaces provider capacity. Arlington, positioned between the two anchor cities, has become a natural expansion corridor for medical practices, specialty groups, urgent care operators, and healthcare services companies looking to serve the rapidly growing suburbs of Mansfield, Grand Prairie, and the mid-cities. Texas Health Arlington Memorial Hospital and Medical City Arlington are the major hospital anchors, but the fastest growth is occurring among independent practices and outpatient facilities that are filling the primary care and specialty gaps across the region.
The financial complexity of healthcare expansion in Arlington is compounded by Texas's payer landscape. The state's uninsured rate hovers around 17%—the highest of any large state—because Texas has not expanded Medicaid under the ACA. For practices serving broad patient populations, this means a higher share of self-pay and charity care encounters that reduce effective collection rates. Managing payer mix by location becomes a strategic exercise: a practice in a higher-income Arlington neighborhood will draw a different insurance profile than one near a commercial corridor serving hourly workers. Understanding these dynamics at the site level, and modeling how each location's payer mix affects its break-even timeline and long-term profitability, requires financial reporting that most bookkeepers cannot produce.
Provider recruitment adds another financial dimension. Attracting physicians and specialists to Arlington means competing with practices across the entire DFW metroplex for a limited pool of clinical talent. Signing bonuses, relocation packages, guaranteed minimum compensation during ramp-up periods, and production-based compensation structures all must be modeled financially before the hire is made. A physician who costs $350,000 in total compensation during their first year but generates only $200,000 in collections creates a $150,000 cash outlay that must be financed from existing operations. If a growing practice hires two or three providers simultaneously, the cumulative ramp-period cash drain can stress working capital significantly. Finance leadership that can model these hiring decisions, project break-even timelines, and manage the cash flow implications of rapid provider expansion is essential for healthcare companies growing in the DFW market.
What Growing Arlington Businesses Need from a Finance Partner
Arlington's economy rewards businesses that can manage financial complexity specific to their industry and the local market. Event services companies need forecasting models that integrate venue calendars, weather data, and historical attendance patterns into cash flow projections that accurately predict seasonal peaks and troughs. Automotive suppliers need cost accounting systems that produce defensible per-unit profitability data and working capital models calibrated to OEM payment cycles. Defense subcontractors need DCAA-compliant accounting structures that properly allocate indirect costs without destroying competitiveness. Healthcare providers need payer-mix-aware financial reporting that enables data-driven expansion decisions. And every business in Arlington needs a tax strategy that optimizes across franchise tax, property tax, and entity structure decisions.
Generic accounting services cannot deliver this level of financial insight because they apply standardized processes without regard to the specific dynamics that drive profitability in each industry. A thirteen-week cash flow forecast for an event services company requires a fundamentally different model than one for a manufacturing company, and both are different from what a healthcare practice needs. A finance partner that serves Arlington businesses must understand these differences and build financial infrastructure tailored to each client's actual operating reality—not a one-size-fits-all template that ignores the mechanics of how the business actually generates and consumes cash.
Arlington's business community also reflects the broader DFW pattern of owners who operate across multiple businesses and industries. A construction company owner who also holds commercial real estate and manages an event services firm needs consolidated financial oversight that provides visibility across all entities, manages intercompany transactions cleanly, and plans tax strategy across the full portfolio. This multi-entity complexity is the norm among business owners at the $5M to $50M level in the DFW metroplex, and the finance partner who treats each entity as an isolated engagement misses the strategic opportunities—and the risks—that are only visible at the portfolio level.
Scale Your Arlington Business with Confidence
Get finance leadership that understands event-driven revenue, automotive supply chains, defense compliance, and the real complexity of Texas's tax environment. We work with Arlington businesses from $5M to $50M in revenue.