Outsourced CFO & Accounting Services in McKinney, TX
Financial leadership built for North Texas's fastest-growing corridor. Expert outsourced finance for defense contractors, healthcare organizations, construction companies, and professional services firms navigating rapid growth, corporate relocations, and the unique tax dynamics of doing business in Collin County.
The McKinney Business Landscape
McKinney has been one of the fastest-growing cities in America for two decades running, and the business landscape has evolved far beyond its origins as a quiet Collin County seat. The city's population has more than tripled since 2000, surpassing 200,000 residents, and the commercial economy has kept pace. Raytheon Technologies operates a significant facility in the area, anchoring a defense contracting ecosystem that includes engineering services firms, electronics subcontractors, cybersecurity companies, and cleared IT services providers. The Raytheon supply chain alone sustains dozens of smaller companies in the $5M to $30M revenue range, each managing the specialized compliance requirements that come with defense work while simultaneously trying to grow their commercial business lines.
Healthcare has expanded aggressively to serve the growing population. Medical City McKinney, Baylor Scott & White Medical Center at McKinney, and a proliferating network of specialty practices and urgent care centers have transformed the city into a significant healthcare market. The construction industry is perhaps the most visible driver of economic activity—with new residential subdivisions, commercial developments, school buildings, and road infrastructure under construction simultaneously across the city, general contractors and specialty trades companies are running at full capacity. And McKinney's revitalized historic downtown district has become a magnet for professional services firms, creative agencies, financial advisory practices, and technology companies that want the character of a walkable downtown paired with the economic energy of one of the fastest-growing metros in the country.
For business owners managing $5M to $50M in revenue, McKinney's growth trajectory creates opportunities and hazards in equal measure. Revenue growth can be explosive when you are operating in a market that adds thousands of new residents and hundreds of new businesses every year. But rapid growth consumes cash, strains working capital, and exposes operational weaknesses that were invisible at a smaller scale. The companies that thrive in McKinney's hyper-growth environment are the ones with finance leadership that can manage the pace without losing control of the numbers.
200,000+ Residents
3x Growth Since 2000
Among America's fastest-growing
Raytheon Facility
Defense Anchor
Supply chain ecosystem in Collin County
Historic Downtown
Revitalized District
Professional services & tech hub
Rapid Growth and the Cash Flow Trap
The most dangerous period for a McKinney business is often the one that looks the most successful on paper. When revenue is growing 30% or 50% year over year—which is common in a market adding population and commercial activity at McKinney's pace—the income statement looks outstanding. But the balance sheet tells a different story. Every new customer requires working capital to serve before they pay. Every new employee requires salary, benefits, and equipment before they generate revenue. Every new project requires materials, subcontractor deposits, and mobilization costs before the first progress payment arrives. In a fast-growth environment, the gap between spending cash and collecting cash widens with every month of acceleration, and companies that do not manage this gap proactively can find themselves unable to make payroll despite having a record-setting revenue pipeline.
This is particularly acute for construction companies and professional services firms in McKinney, where the work-in-progress cycle can stretch 60 to 120 days from cost incurrence to payment receipt. A general contractor managing five active projects simultaneously might have $2M in unbilled work-in-progress and another $1M in billed-but-uncollected receivables at any given time—and if they win two more projects next month, those numbers grow proportionally while their credit line stays the same size. Professional services firms face a similar dynamic: every new client engagement requires staffing up before the engagement generates cash, and if the firm is adding three or four new engagements per quarter, the cumulative cash requirement can outpace available liquidity surprisingly fast.
Finance leadership in this environment means building rolling 13-week cash flow forecasts that project cash needs at a granular level, structuring credit facilities with enough headroom to accommodate planned growth without requiring emergency renegotiation, and maintaining discipline around billing and collections even when the sales team is focused on winning the next deal. It also means knowing when to say no to a growth opportunity because the cash flow math does not work—a decision that requires financial clarity and courage in a market where every competitor seems to be expanding as fast as possible.
Defense Contracting in the North Texas Corridor
McKinney's position in the North Texas defense corridor is anchored by Raytheon but extends far beyond a single prime contractor. The broader DFW metroplex is home to Lockheed Martin's F-35 production facility in Fort Worth, L3Harris operations in multiple locations, and hundreds of defense-focused companies ranging from large system integrators to small specialized subcontractors. McKinney companies that serve this ecosystem—whether providing engineering design services, manufacturing precision components, developing software for defense applications, or offering cleared IT staffing—must navigate a compliance environment that adds significant cost and complexity to every aspect of their financial operations.
DCAA compliance is the baseline requirement. Companies holding government contracts must maintain cost accounting systems that segregate direct costs (charged to specific contracts) from indirect costs (allocated across all contracts through overhead, general and administrative, and fringe benefit rate pools). The indirect rate structure must be developed prospectively, applied consistently, and defended during annual incurred cost submissions that the DCAA can audit at any time. For a company in the $5M to $20M range, this often means maintaining two parallel accounting systems—one that satisfies DCAA requirements and one that provides the management reporting the business needs to make operational decisions. ITAR compliance adds another layer for companies handling export-controlled technical data, requiring documentation systems and personnel security clearance tracking that have direct cost implications.
The financial reward for getting defense contracting right is substantial. Defense contracts provide predictable revenue streams, often with built-in escalation clauses and multi-year periods of performance. But the penalty for getting it wrong is severe: a DCAA audit finding can result in cost disallowances that wipe out contract profitability, and serious compliance failures can lead to debarment from future government work—which, for a company where defense revenue represents 60% or 70% of total revenue, is effectively a death sentence. An outsourced finance team with DCAA experience can manage the compliance burden at a fraction of the cost of hiring a full-time government accounting specialist at North Texas salary levels, while also providing the strategic finance leadership that helps the company grow its commercial business lines alongside its defense work.
Construction in a Hyper-Growth Market
McKinney's construction market is one of the most active in the entire DFW metroplex, and the financial demands on contractors and trades companies are correspondingly intense. New residential subdivisions are breaking ground continuously across the city's northern and western expansion areas. Commercial developments—including retail centers, office buildings, medical facilities, and mixed-use projects—are keeping pace with population growth. McKinney Independent School District has been one of the most active school construction programs in Texas, building new campuses every year or two to keep up with enrollment growth. And the infrastructure required to support all of this—roads, water and sewer systems, drainage, and utilities—generates a steady pipeline of municipal construction contracts.
For construction companies in the $5M to $50M revenue range, this environment creates both opportunity and exposure. The opportunity is obvious: there is more work available than most companies can handle, and strong demand means less competitive pressure on margins. The exposure is more subtle but equally real. Job costing accuracy becomes critical when a company is managing 10 or 20 active projects simultaneously—a 3% cost overrun across a $30M project portfolio means nearly $1M in lost profit, and those overruns are invisible without real-time job cost tracking that compares actual costs against estimates at the line-item level. Percentage-of-completion revenue recognition requires monthly cost-to-complete estimates that are genuinely reflective of project status, not just mathematical extrapolations from the budget. Retainage management across dozens of projects can lock up hundreds of thousands of dollars in receivables that are contractually owed but not yet collectible.
Bonding capacity is often the binding constraint on growth for McKinney construction companies. Surety companies evaluate bonding capacity based on financial strength—working capital, equity, and the quality of financial reporting. A company that wants to bid on a $10M school project needs financial statements that demonstrate the working capital and project management infrastructure to complete the work. An outsourced finance team that understands construction accounting can help a growing contractor improve its financial presentation to sureties, manage the cash flow dynamics of progress billing and retainage, and build the financial infrastructure that supports moving from $10M to $30M or $50M in annual revenue without outrunning the company's bonding capacity.
Corporate Relocations and Multi-State Complexity
McKinney has been a significant beneficiary of the corporate relocation wave that has brought companies from California, Illinois, New York, and other high-tax states to North Texas. The combination of no state income tax, lower cost of living, a business-friendly regulatory environment, and access to the DFW talent pool has made Collin County one of the most popular relocation destinations in the country. But for business owners navigating this transition, the financial complexity of relocating a company is far more involved than simply moving the headquarters address. Most relocating companies retain operations, employees, or customers in their origin states, creating multi-state nexus obligations that do not disappear when the CEO's driver's license changes.
Multi-state tax nexus is the primary concern. A company that relocates its headquarters to McKinney but retains salespeople in California still has California income tax nexus. A company with a warehouse in Illinois still has Illinois nexus. Even companies with remote employees in other states may trigger payroll tax withholding obligations and income tax filing requirements in those states. The entity restructuring required to optimize a multi-state footprint—potentially converting from a C-corporation to an S-corporation or LLC to take advantage of Texas's pass-through entity treatment, establishing separate entities for different business lines or geographic markets, and managing intercompany transactions between entities—requires financial and tax expertise that goes far beyond basic accounting.
For companies that have recently relocated to McKinney, the first two to three years are critical. State taxing authorities in California and Illinois, in particular, are aggressive about asserting continuing nexus for companies that have nominally moved but retain economic connections. Proper documentation of the relocation—including demonstrating that management and control functions have genuinely moved to Texas, that intercompany transfer pricing is arm's-length, and that payroll and operations in the origin state have been appropriately wound down—can be the difference between a clean break and years of audit exposure. A finance partner with multi-state tax experience can guide this transition in a way that maximizes the benefit of moving to Texas while minimizing the risk of audit challenges from the states left behind.
Texas Franchise Tax and Collin County Property Tax
The absence of a state income tax is the headline that attracts businesses to Texas, but the reality of the Texas tax environment is more nuanced than the marketing suggests. The Texas franchise tax—formally the margin tax—applies to all taxable entities doing business in Texas and is calculated on the lowest of four computation methods: 70% of total revenue, total revenue minus cost of goods sold, total revenue minus compensation, or $1 million. The tax rate is 0.375% for retail and wholesale businesses and 0.75% for all others. Applied to revenue rather than profit, this tax can represent a meaningful burden for companies with thin margins. A professional services firm generating $20M in revenue at a 10% net margin pays franchise tax of $150,000—which is 7.5% of its net income, a rate that would be notable in any state income tax regime.
Collin County property taxes deserve equal attention. Texas relies heavily on property taxes to fund local services, and Collin County's effective property tax rates are among the highest in the state. For businesses with significant real property holdings—office buildings, warehouses, retail locations, or construction equipment yards—the annual property tax bill can be substantial. Assessed valuations in a rapidly appreciating market like McKinney tend to rise aggressively, and the appraisal district's initial valuation is almost always worth protesting. A successful protest on a $5M commercial property can save $15,000 to $30,000 per year, and for companies with multiple properties, the cumulative savings justify professional attention to the protest process every single year.
Sales tax adds another layer. McKinney's combined sales tax rate is 8.25%, and for businesses that sell taxable goods or services, the compliance requirements include proper collection, remittance, and documentation across city, county, transit authority, and state jurisdictions. Companies that operate across multiple Texas jurisdictions—common for construction companies and professional services firms that serve clients throughout the DFW metroplex—must track and remit sales tax to the correct jurisdictions based on where the goods are delivered or services are performed. A finance team that manages franchise tax planning, property tax protests, and sales tax compliance as an integrated function can protect margins in ways that pay for the engagement many times over.
What Growing McKinney Businesses Need from a Finance Partner
The defining characteristic of McKinney's business environment is velocity. Companies grow faster here than in most American cities, and the financial infrastructure must keep pace. A business that was comfortable with a part-time bookkeeper at $3M in revenue discovers at $8M that it cannot produce the financial statements its bank requires, cannot track job profitability across multiple active projects, and cannot forecast cash needs accurately enough to avoid periodic scrambles for liquidity. By $15M or $20M, the financial requirements include board-quality financial reporting, multi-year forecasting, credit facility management, and strategic planning around capital allocation—functions that require CFO-level expertise rather than bookkeeping skill.
A finance partner serving McKinney businesses needs to understand the specific dynamics of this market. That means knowing how defense contract compliance works for companies in the Raytheon supply chain, understanding construction accounting for contractors building the city's physical infrastructure, and having experience with the multi-state tax issues that relocating companies bring with them. It also means being comfortable with growth rates that would be unusual in more established markets—a McKinney business that doubles in three years is not an outlier but a norm, and the financial planning must account for that trajectory without either overextending the company or failing to invest adequately in the infrastructure needed to sustain the growth.
The right finance partner brings a combination of technical expertise and strategic perspective that helps McKinney business owners make confident decisions about hiring, capital investment, geographic expansion, and entity structuring. In a market where the opportunities are abundant but the execution risk is real, having a finance team that provides clear, timely, and accurate financial intelligence is the difference between sustainable growth and the kind of overextension that turns a promising company into a cautionary tale.
Scale Your McKinney Business with Confidence
Get finance leadership that understands defense contracting, construction accounting, corporate relocation tax dynamics, and Collin County's hyper-growth environment. We work with McKinney businesses from $5M to $50M in revenue.