Outsourced CFO & Accounting Services in Austin
Financial leadership built for the fastest-growing major metro in America. Expert outsourced finance for construction companies, healthcare practices, food and hospitality operators, and professional services firms navigating the explosive demand, escalating costs, and deceptively complex tax environment of the Austin-Round Rock-Georgetown corridor.
The Austin Business Landscape
Austin gets national attention for the technology companies that have relocated here—Tesla's Gigafactory in southeast Travis County, Samsung's $17 billion semiconductor fabrication facility in nearby Taylor, Apple's $1 billion campus, Oracle's relocated headquarters, and the major offices that Meta, Google, and Amazon have established across the metro area. But the companies most profoundly affected by Austin's growth are not the tech giants themselves. They are the thousands of businesses in the $5M to $50M range that build the commercial buildings and housing developments, staff the hospitals and medical practices, feed the expanding workforce, and provide the professional services that a metro area of 2.4 million people—growing at more than 30% over the past decade—requires. These are the companies that are simultaneously riding the wave of Austin's growth and being challenged by it, because the same demand that fills their order books also drives up their costs, strains their labor supply, and overwhelms the financial systems that worked when the business was half its current size.
The economic scale behind this growth is substantial. The Austin-Round Rock metro GDP exceeds $170 billion, placing it among the 30 largest metropolitan economies in the country. Construction building permits have averaged $8 billion to $12 billion annually in recent years, reflecting both massive commercial projects and residential development that stretches through Pflugerville, Hutto, Georgetown, Leander, and Kyle. Ascension Seton, Baylor Scott & White, and St. David's HealthCare operate the major hospital systems, but independent physician groups, specialty practices, urgent care centers, and dental groups are expanding rapidly to serve a population that is growing faster than the healthcare infrastructure can accommodate. Austin's identity as a food and live music capital—cemented by South by Southwest, Austin City Limits, the Formula 1 United States Grand Prix, and a restaurant scene that draws national attention—supports a hospitality economy that generates billions annually and employs tens of thousands.
For business owners managing $5M to $50M in revenue, Austin's growth is the opportunity and the problem simultaneously. The demand is real and sustained. But managing rapid growth in an increasingly expensive market, maintaining profitability as labor and material costs escalate, and navigating a Texas tax environment that is far more complex than its "no income tax" reputation suggests require financial leadership that most growing companies do not have in-house. The gap between where a company's financial systems are and where they need to be tends to widen silently during periods of rapid growth—and by the time the business owner recognizes the problem, the consequences are already visible on the balance sheet.
30%+ Decade
Population Growth
2.4M metro area residents
$170B+
Metro GDP
Top 30 U.S. metro economy
$8-12B Annual
Building Permits
Sustained construction boom
Construction: Cash Flow Under Pressure
Austin's construction market has operated at a sustained intensity that has few parallels in the country. The development pipeline spans industrial megaprojects like the Samsung Taylor fab and Tesla's continuing campus expansion, downtown high-rise residential and office towers, suburban master-planned communities spreading north through Williamson County and south into Hays County, and commercial retail and medical office projects filling the corridors between established cities and the newly incorporated suburbs. For general contractors, specialty subcontractors, civil engineering firms, and construction services companies in the $5M to $50M range, the volume of available work has been extraordinary. But volume alone does not make a construction company profitable. Cash flow management does, and Austin's construction dynamics create cash flow challenges that require genuine financial sophistication to navigate.
The structural cash flow problem in construction is retainage. Standard construction contracts withhold 5% to 10% of each progress billing as retainage, held until the project reaches substantial completion. A contractor billing $1.5 million per month across active projects might have $100,000 to $150,000 withheld from each billing cycle, accumulating to retainage balances of $500,000 to $1.5 million or more that will not convert to cash for 12 to 18 months. Meanwhile, the contractor must pay material suppliers on net-30 to net-60 terms, meet biweekly payroll for crews, and pay subcontractors on timelines that are often faster than its own collection schedule. This structural mismatch between when cash goes out and when it comes in creates a permanent working capital requirement that must be financed—typically through a revolving line of credit—and the sizing, cost, and management of that credit facility directly affects the company's profitability and capacity to take on new work.
Material cost volatility compounds the risk. Austin's building boom has driven up local demand for concrete, lumber, structural steel, and specialty materials, and the gap between bid pricing and actual purchase prices can shift dramatically over a six-to-twelve-month project timeline. A general contractor that submitted a competitive bid in February and starts framing in August may find lumber prices 12% to 18% above budget. Without job costing systems that compare actual costs to estimates in real time, flag variances as they emerge, and enable proactive conversations about change orders or scope adjustments, project managers discover cost overruns at completion—when the margin damage is irreversible. Finance leadership that understands construction accounting—WIP scheduling, percentage-of-completion revenue recognition, bonding capacity analysis, and retainage tracking—is what keeps growing Austin contractors profitable as they scale.
Healthcare: Expanding into a Supply-Constrained Market
Austin's population growth has created a healthcare demand-supply gap that is visible across virtually every specialty. Primary care practices are booking new patients weeks out. High-demand specialists in dermatology, orthopedics, psychiatry, and gastroenterology maintain wait lists that stretch for months. Urgent care centers and freestanding emergency departments have proliferated across the metro as patients seek alternatives to overwhelmed hospital emergency rooms. For healthcare business owners—physician groups, dental practices, specialty clinics, ambulatory surgery centers, home health agencies, and healthcare services companies—the signal from the market is unambiguous: there are more patients than there are providers to serve them. The question is not whether demand exists. It is whether you can expand fast enough to capture it without breaking your cash flow in the process.
Opening a new practice location in an Austin suburb—Cedar Park, Round Rock, Kyle, Buda, Pflugerville—requires $500,000 to $2 million in upfront capital, depending on the specialty and the scope of the buildout. Lease construction, medical equipment, IT infrastructure, initial staffing, and pre-opening marketing all demand cash before a single patient generates revenue. Once open, a new location typically takes 12 to 24 months to ramp to break-even as the provider builds a patient panel and establishes referral relationships in the local community. During that ramp period, the new location operates at a loss that must be subsidized by cash flow from established locations. If a practice opens two or three new sites within a twelve-month window—which many Austin practices are doing to capture the growth opportunity—the cumulative ramp-period cash outlay can exceed $2 million to $4 million before any of the new sites contributes positively. Without site-level financial reporting that cleanly separates each location's performance, practice owners cannot distinguish a new site that is ramping on schedule from one that is hemorrhaging cash with no trajectory toward viability.
Austin's payer mix adds complexity. Texas did not expand Medicaid, and the state's uninsured rate of approximately 15% to 17% is among the highest in the nation. Practices that serve broad patient populations encounter self-pay and charity care volumes that are substantially higher than practices in Medicaid-expansion states. At the same time, Austin's rapid growth in employer-insured population—driven by tech company employment—creates pockets of highly favorable commercial payer mix in certain neighborhoods. Understanding which of your locations draws primarily commercial patients and which serves a higher proportion of uninsured or Medicaid patients enables better expansion decisions, more targeted payer contract negotiations, and pricing strategies that account for the real collection characteristics of each site. This level of payer-mix-aware financial analysis is a step beyond standard bookkeeping, and it is precisely the kind of insight that separates practices that scale profitably from those that grow into a cash crisis.
The Texas Tax Environment: Franchise Tax, Property Tax, and Entity Structure
Texas's absence of a personal income tax is a genuine and significant advantage for business owners. It is also the beginning, not the end, of the tax conversation. The Texas franchise tax—officially the margin tax—applies to every business entity with total revenue above $2.47 million. The tax can be calculated using four different methods: total revenue minus cost of goods sold, total revenue minus compensation, total revenue multiplied by 70%, or an EZ computation at a reduced rate on total revenue. The optimal method depends on your company's specific cost structure, and the difference between the best and worst choice can be substantial. A professional services firm with $20 million in revenue and $9 million in compensation costs saves meaningfully by using the compensation deduction rather than the 70% method—but a distribution company with $20 million in revenue and $14 million in cost of goods sold achieves a better result with the COGS deduction. Choosing the wrong method is one of the most common and expensive financial planning mistakes among mid-market Texas businesses.
Entity structuring decisions compound the franchise tax picture. Business owners in Austin frequently operate through multiple entities: an operating company, a real estate holding entity, an equipment leasing company, and perhaps an investment vehicle. Each entity's franchise tax position must be evaluated independently, and the interplay between entities—management fees, lease payments, intercompany transactions—can affect the franchise tax calculation for each one. Structures that were tax-efficient when a business generated $4 million in revenue may become suboptimal at $15 million, but many owners never revisit these decisions because their accounting firm treats entity structure as a one-time formation question rather than an ongoing strategic optimization.
Property tax is where the Texas tax burden becomes genuinely significant. Without income tax revenue, Texas relies on property taxes to fund local government, public schools, and infrastructure. Travis County's effective commercial property tax rates run approximately 2% to 2.5% of assessed value. Williamson County (covering Round Rock, Cedar Park, and Georgetown) runs slightly lower but still represents a top-five operating expense for many businesses. A construction company with a facility and equipment yard appraised at $5 million faces $100,000 to $125,000 in annual property tax. A restaurant group operating five locations under triple-net leases where property tax is a pass-through cost absorbs the landlord's property tax burden at every site. Protesting assessed values is not an occasional exercise—it is a recurring financial management activity that should happen every year, because appraisal districts routinely overvalue properties, and companies that fail to protest consistently pay more than they should. A finance partner that manages franchise tax optimization, entity structure review, property tax protests, and sales tax compliance across the full Austin tax landscape protects margins that would otherwise erode incrementally and invisibly.
Food, Hospitality, and Austin's Event-Driven Economy
Austin's identity as a food and live music destination has produced a restaurant and hospitality economy that punches well above the city's population. The metro area supports an estimated 8,000 to 9,000 food establishments, from iconic barbecue operations like Franklin Barbecue and la Barbecue to multi-unit restaurant groups operating 5 to 15 locations across the metro. The event calendar adds concentrated revenue spikes that can transform a hospitality company's annual financial profile: South by Southwest generates an estimated $350 million in economic impact over ten days, the Austin City Limits Music Festival fills two October weekends, the Formula 1 United States Grand Prix at Circuit of the Americas brings 400,000 visitors to the area, and dozens of smaller festivals, conferences, and corporate events fill the calendar throughout the year.
For restaurant groups and hospitality companies generating $5M to $30M in revenue, the financial management requirements are intense and relentless. Food cost management demands tracking ingredient prices across hundreds of SKUs, monitoring waste and spoilage, and adjusting menu pricing as input costs shift—all while maintaining the guest experience that drives repeat business. Labor typically consumes 30% to 35% of revenue for full-service restaurants in Austin's tight labor market, and annual turnover rates of 70% to 80% create a constant cycle of recruiting, training, and ramp-up costs that many operators treat as a cost of doing business rather than a financial problem to be managed. Multi-unit operators need consolidated financial reporting that delivers location-level profit and loss analysis, enabling comparisons of food cost percentages, labor efficiency ratios, and revenue per square foot across the portfolio. Without this granularity, underperforming locations quietly drain profitability while a few strong performers mask the problem in aggregate reporting.
Event-driven revenue concentration adds a forecasting dimension that steady-state businesses do not face. A restaurant near the Austin Convention Center might see revenue double during SXSW and drop to normal the following week. A catering company might book $600,000 in event revenue during October and $120,000 in January. These patterns require cash flow models that account for seasonal revenue peaks, the working capital needed to pre-purchase inventory and pre-staff for major events, and reserve management to cover the lean months that inevitably follow. The financial modeling for an Austin hospitality business looks nothing like the model for a professional services firm with predictable monthly revenue—and the finance partner who applies a services firm template to a hospitality company will produce forecasts that are wrong in ways that create real operational consequences.
When Growth Outpaces Your Financial Infrastructure
Austin's rapid growth creates a pattern that repeats across industries: a company that was generating $3 million in revenue five years ago is now doing $12 million or $18 million, but its financial systems have not kept pace. The same bookkeeper who managed the books at $3 million is still entering transactions at $18 million, using the same QuickBooks setup, the same informal budgeting process, and the same monthly reporting package that provided adequate visibility when the business was a fraction of its current size. The owner knows something is wrong—cash feels tighter than the revenue numbers suggest it should, profit margins seem to be compressing, and the bank is asking questions about financial covenants that the owner does not fully understand—but the specific nature of the problem is invisible because the financial reporting lacks the granularity to diagnose it.
The capabilities a company needs at each revenue level are not incremental extensions of what came before. At $5 million, you need accurate monthly financial statements and basic cash flow monitoring. At $15 million, you need departmental or project-level profitability analysis, formal budgeting with monthly variance reporting, rolling cash flow forecasts, working capital management, and the ability to produce financial packages that satisfy banking requirements. At $30 million and above, you need board-level reporting, strategic financial planning, acquisition and capital investment modeling, banking relationships managed at the CFO level, and financial controls that can withstand the scrutiny of external auditors. Each of these transitions requires a step-function upgrade in financial leadership, not an incremental improvement.
Building that capability internally in Austin is expensive and slow. A full-time controller commands $110,000 to $145,000 in base salary plus benefits. A CFO-level hire runs $190,000 to $260,000 or more in this market. The recruiting process takes three to six months, and the onboarding period to deeply understand the business adds another three to six months. For a company that needs financial leadership now—because the credit line is maxed, because a major contract requires audited financials, because the business has grown into a multi-entity structure that nobody fully understands from a tax perspective—an outsourced finance team provides the capability immediately, at a fraction of the internal hire cost, with the flexibility to scale the engagement as the business continues to grow.
What Growing Austin Businesses Need from a Finance Partner
The common thread across Austin's core industries is that rapid growth makes every financial problem more complex and more urgent. A construction company adding $4 million in annual revenue is simultaneously adding hundreds of thousands in retainage receivables, new subcontractor payment obligations, increased bonding requirements, and additional insurance costs. A healthcare practice opening two new locations is layering buildout capital, ramp-period losses, payer credentialing timelines, and provider recruitment costs on top of normal operations. A restaurant group expanding by two units per year is stacking lease obligations, equipment financing, pre-opening expenses, and hiring costs while managing the food cost and labor challenges of the existing portfolio. Growth does not simplify these dynamics. It compounds them.
A finance partner serving Austin businesses must understand the local market context rather than applying national templates. That means building cash flow models for construction companies that reflect Austin's specific retainage practices and material cost dynamics, not national averages. It means modeling healthcare practice expansions with realistic assumptions about Austin's payer mix, provider ramp timelines, and build-out costs in this real estate market. It means understanding how the franchise tax calculation method interacts with your specific cost structure, how property tax protests work in Travis and Williamson counties, and how event-driven seasonality affects hospitality cash flow planning. National benchmarks are useful directional indicators, but they are not substitutes for models built on the assumptions that actually govern your market.
Austin's entrepreneurial business culture also means that many business owners operate across multiple entities and industries simultaneously. A construction company owner who is also developing commercial real estate, managing rental properties, and investing in a restaurant concept needs consolidated financial oversight that spans the entire portfolio. An architect who has grown a design firm to $8 million and launched a real estate development side business needs financial planning that accounts for the cash flow interactions between the two entities. These multi-entity structures are not the exception among Austin business owners at the $5M to $50M level—they are the norm. The finance partner who only sees one entity in isolation will miss optimization opportunities, risk exposures, and strategic insights that are only visible when the full portfolio is managed together.
Scale Your Austin Business with Confidence
Get finance leadership that understands construction cash flow, healthcare expansion, Texas tax strategy, and the financial complexity of America's fastest-growing major metro. We work with Austin businesses from $5M to $50M in revenue.