Outsourced CFO & Accounting Services in El Paso
Financial leadership where the Americas converge. Expert outsourced finance for cross-border trade operators, Fort Bliss defense contractors, logistics companies, and healthcare providers navigating multi-currency operations, DCAA compliance, transfer pricing, and the binational economy of the largest inland port of entry in the Western Hemisphere.
The El Paso Business Landscape
El Paso occupies one of the most strategically significant positions in the Western Hemisphere for commerce. Together with Ciudad Juarez across the Rio Grande, the binational metro area encompasses nearly 2.7 million people and processes over $100 billion in goods through its international bridges annually. The four commercial ports of entry—Bridge of the Americas, Ysleta-Zaragoza, the Paso del Norte bridge, and the Santa Teresa crossing just across the New Mexico state line—handle a combined flow of goods that makes this corridor one of the busiest trade arteries in North America. Thousands of maquiladora operations in Juarez depend on El Paso-based companies for supply chain management, customs brokerage, warehousing, and logistics coordination, creating an entire business ecosystem built on the daily movement of goods, components, and finished products across the international boundary.
Fort Bliss, the second-largest Army installation in the United States by area, occupies over 1.1 million acres of desert terrain spanning the Texas-New Mexico border. Home to the 1st Armored Division and William Beaumont Army Medical Center, the installation employs tens of thousands of military personnel and civilian workers and generates a defense contracting economy that extends deep into the metro's private sector. Facility maintenance companies, IT services providers, engineering firms, construction contractors, and medical staffing agencies all serve Fort Bliss contracts that are often worth millions annually. The healthcare economy serves a binational patient population with a payer mix that spans commercial insurance, TRICARE, Medicare, Medicaid, and Mexican self-pay patients who cross the border specifically for American medical care.
For business owners managing $5M to $50M in revenue, El Paso is a city where the financial complexity far exceeds what the metro's size might suggest. Multi-currency operations, IMMEX program accounting, transfer pricing documentation for the IRS and Mexico's SAT, DCAA-compliant government contracting, and cross-border payer mix management all demand finance leadership with specialized expertise. The companies that thrive in this corridor are the ones that treat these complexities as competitive advantages rather than administrative burdens—and that requires a finance team that understands how money moves across the border as fluently as the trucks that cross the bridges every morning.
$100B+ Annual Trade
Inland Port
Largest in the Western Hemisphere
Fort Bliss
1.1M Acres
Second-largest Army installation
Binational Metro
2.7M People
El Paso & Ciudad Juarez combined
Cross-Border Trade: Multi-Currency and Transfer Pricing
Companies operating in the El Paso-Juarez corridor move money across the border as routinely as commuters cross the bridge. A manufacturer with an El Paso headquarters and a Juarez production facility transacts in both U.S. dollars and Mexican pesos daily—paying wages in pesos, purchasing raw materials in dollars, selling finished goods in either or both currencies, and reconciling intercompany transactions that must satisfy tax authorities on both sides of the border. The peso-dollar exchange rate fluctuates constantly, and a 10% swing in the exchange rate over a quarter can turn a profitable operation into a losing one if currency exposure is not managed proactively.
Transfer pricing is where cross-border financial management becomes truly complex. When an El Paso company sells components to its own Juarez subsidiary for assembly, or when the Juarez plant ships finished goods back to El Paso for distribution, the prices assigned to those intercompany transactions must satisfy both the IRS and Mexico's Servicio de Administracion Tributaria. Both authorities want to ensure that profits are not being artificially shifted to the lower-tax jurisdiction. The documentation requirements are extensive: companies must prepare transfer pricing studies that demonstrate their intercompany prices are consistent with arm's length standards, maintain contemporaneous documentation, and update their analyses annually. A transfer pricing assessment that satisfies the IRS but not the SAT—or vice versa—can result in double taxation on the same income.
Mexico's IMMEX program (Industria Manufacturera, Maquiladora y de Servicios de Exportacion) adds another layer. Companies operating under IMMEX can temporarily import raw materials, components, and equipment into Mexico duty-free, provided the finished goods are exported. But the program comes with detailed record-keeping requirements: tracking the entry and exit of every temporary import, maintaining compliance with time limits for re-export, and producing documentation for Mexican customs authorities that proves every kilogram of imported material was either incorporated into an exported product or returned. For a company managing hundreds or thousands of SKUs through this process, the accounting complexity is enormous, and the penalties for non-compliance include duty assessments, fines, and potential loss of the IMMEX authorization itself.
Defense Contracting at Fort Bliss
Fort Bliss is far more than a military base—it is a small city and an economic engine that drives billions of dollars in annual spending across the El Paso metro. The 1st Armored Division, the Joint Modernization Command, and William Beaumont Army Medical Center all generate contracting opportunities for local businesses across a wide range of services: facility maintenance and construction, information technology, medical staffing, logistics support, training services, and environmental remediation. For an El Paso company looking to grow, Fort Bliss contracts represent a massive and relatively stable revenue opportunity. But accessing that opportunity requires financial infrastructure that most growing companies do not have in place when they bid on their first government contract.
The Defense Contract Audit Agency will audit your cost accounting system, and what they are looking for is specific. Direct costs must be charged to individual contracts based on actual usage. Indirect costs—fringe benefits, overhead, and general & administrative expenses—must be accumulated in defined cost pools and allocated to contracts using consistent, defensible allocation bases. Unallowable costs (entertainment, alcohol, certain lobbying expenses, fines, and penalties) must be identified and excluded from any cost pool that is allocated to government work. And every year, the company must prepare an incurred cost submission that details all of these calculations for the completed fiscal year. The submission deadline is six months after year-end, and a late or inaccurate submission can trigger an audit of every open contract.
For companies that also perform commercial work—which is true of most El Paso defense contractors, since the cross-border trade economy provides plenty of private sector opportunity—the accounting systems must segregate government and commercial activities while sharing common overhead pools. This dual-purpose requirement is one of the most common areas where growing contractors make mistakes, either by commingling costs that should be separated or by maintaining two completely separate accounting systems that double the administrative burden. A finance team experienced in government contracting can design a unified system that satisfies DCAA requirements while efficiently handling commercial accounting—giving the company the compliance it needs without the overhead of redundant processes.
Customs Brokerage, Logistics, and Foreign Trade Zones
El Paso's position as the largest inland port of entry means that customs brokers, freight forwarders, third-party logistics providers, and warehousing companies form a substantial and highly specialized sector of the local economy. These businesses process thousands of customs entries daily, coordinate the movement of goods through congested port infrastructure, and navigate a regulatory environment that includes U.S. Customs and Border Protection requirements, Mexican customs regulations, Department of Transportation safety standards, and FDA or USDA inspections for food, pharmaceuticals, and agricultural products. The financial management of these operations is as complex as the operations themselves.
Duty drawback programs allow companies to recover duties paid on imported materials that are subsequently incorporated into exported products. For a manufacturer or distributor processing significant volumes through El Paso, the drawback recovery can amount to hundreds of thousands of dollars annually. But claiming drawback requires meticulous documentation that links specific import entries to specific export shipments, tracking the transformation or use of imported materials through the production process. Companies that lack the financial systems to perform this tracking leave the money on the table. Similarly, Foreign Trade Zones in the El Paso area allow companies to defer, reduce, or eliminate duties on imported goods, but realizing those benefits requires inventory accounting systems that track goods within the zone separately from goods in domestic commerce.
Working capital management for logistics companies presents its own challenges. A customs broker or freight forwarder often advances duties, freight charges, and other costs on behalf of clients, then invoices those costs plus a service fee. The cash flow timing gap between advancing these costs and collecting from clients can be substantial, particularly when serving large enterprise clients with 45 to 90-day payment terms. For a $10M logistics company, the outstanding advances to clients can easily represent $1.5 to $2 million in tied-up cash at any given time. A finance team that understands the mechanics of logistics finance can structure billing cycles, manage advance limits, and size credit facilities to keep the business liquid without constraining its ability to serve growing client accounts.
Healthcare in a Binational Market
El Paso's healthcare market serves a patient population that crosses international boundaries daily. University Medical Center of El Paso, The Hospitals of Providence, and Las Palmas Del Sol Healthcare operate facilities that treat not only the 700,000-plus residents of El Paso County but also patients from Ciudad Juarez who cross the border for medical procedures that are unavailable, have long wait times, or are perceived as higher quality on the American side. This creates a payer mix unlike virtually any other market in the country: alongside standard commercial insurance, Medicare, and Medicaid, El Paso healthcare providers routinely handle TRICARE claims from the Fort Bliss military population and self-pay collections from Mexican nationals.
The financial implications of this mixed population are significant. Self-pay patients from Mexico may pay in cash at the time of service, which improves cash flow velocity but requires robust point-of-service collection systems and transparent pricing. TRICARE reimbursement rates and administrative processes differ from commercial insurance in ways that affect both the amount collected and the timing of collection. Medicaid in Texas pays some of the lowest reimbursement rates in the country, which means practices with a high Medicaid patient mix must manage volume carefully to cover fixed costs. And the sheer diversity of the payer mix means that revenue cycle management is more complex per encounter than in markets with more homogeneous insurance coverage.
For a growing physician practice, specialty group, or healthcare services company managing $5M to $30M in revenue, the financial challenges are compounded by El Paso's geographic position. Recruiting physicians and clinical specialists to a border city requires competitive compensation packages, and those packages must be funded by revenue collected from a payer mix that includes some of the lowest reimbursement rates in the country. Financial leadership that can optimize the payer mix, negotiate favorable contract terms with commercial insurers, manage the TRICARE billing cycle efficiently, and build collection systems for the self-pay population is essential to maintaining profitability in this market.
Texas's Business Tax Environment and Border Incentives
Texas has no state income tax, which is one of the primary reasons companies locate and expand here. But the absence of an income tax does not mean the absence of business taxation. Texas levies a franchise tax (often called the "margin tax") on businesses with revenue above a threshold, calculated on the lesser of 70% of total revenue, total revenue minus cost of goods sold, total revenue minus compensation, or $1 million. For manufacturing, distribution, and logistics companies in El Paso that have high costs of goods sold or large payrolls, the franchise tax calculation method can significantly affect the tax liability. Choosing the wrong calculation method—or failing to realize that the optimal method changes as the business grows—leaves real money on the table.
El Paso offers additional incentive programs designed to attract and retain businesses in the border region. The City of El Paso's Economic Development Department administers Chapter 380 economic development agreements that can provide property tax abatements, sales tax rebates, and infrastructure support for qualifying projects. The Texas Enterprise Fund provides financial incentives for companies that create jobs and capital investment. And the state's Enterprise Zone program, which applies to areas including parts of El Paso, provides additional incentives for job creation in economically distressed areas.
For companies operating in Foreign Trade Zones, there are additional tax considerations. Goods held in an FTZ are not subject to state or local property tax in Texas, which can represent meaningful savings for companies holding significant inventory. The interaction between FTZ status, franchise tax calculations, and local property tax exemptions creates planning opportunities that are only available to companies with finance leadership that understands the full landscape. A finance partner who optimizes only the federal tax position while ignoring state and local programs—or vice versa—is leaving value on the table in a market where margins are often tight and every dollar of tax savings contributes directly to competitiveness.
What Growing El Paso Businesses Need from a Finance Partner
The defining characteristic of El Paso's economy is that almost nothing is simple. A transaction that in other cities would be a straightforward domestic sale becomes, in El Paso, a cross-border operation involving customs documentation, transfer pricing analysis, multi-currency settlement, and regulatory compliance on both sides of the border. A government contract that in other cities would require standard accounting becomes, at Fort Bliss, a DCAA compliance exercise with audit risk. A medical billing process that in other cities involves a handful of commercial payers becomes, in El Paso, a multi-language, multi-currency, multi-jurisdiction collection effort spanning two countries.
A finance partner serving El Paso businesses must be comfortable operating in this complexity rather than simplifying it away. That means understanding that a company's books are not clean until the transfer pricing documentation would survive an IRS audit and a SAT review simultaneously. It means knowing that IMMEX compliance is not a customs problem but a financial tracking problem that must be solved with proper inventory accounting. It means recognizing that a defense contractor's commercial and government operations require unified accounting with segregated cost tracking—not two separate systems bolted together.
El Paso is a city where the businesses that understand their financial complexity outperform those that try to avoid it. The company that masters transfer pricing turns it into a competitive advantage on margins. The logistics company that tracks duty drawbacks rigorously recovers hundreds of thousands of dollars that competitors leave unclaimed. The defense contractor with clean DCAA-compliant books wins contracts that competitors cannot bid on because their accounting systems are not audit-ready. In every case, the difference between good and great comes down to the quality of financial leadership—and that is what separates growing companies in El Paso from the ones that plateau.
Scale Your El Paso Business with Confidence
Get finance leadership that understands cross-border trade, IMMEX compliance, Fort Bliss defense contracting, and the binational economy of America's gateway to Mexico. We work with El Paso businesses from $5M to $50M in revenue.