Outsourced CFO & Accounting Services in Omaha
Financial leadership in Warren Buffett's hometown. Expert outsourced finance for insurance companies, food processors, logistics operators, and financial services firms navigating the institutional standards, commodity exposure, and regulatory complexity of the Midwest's most concentrated corporate economy.
The Omaha Business Landscape
Omaha is, per capita, the most concentrated corporate headquarters city in America. Five Fortune 500 companies—Berkshire Hathaway, Mutual of Omaha, Union Pacific, Kiewit Corporation, and Peter Kiewit Sons'—operate from a metro area of fewer than one million people. That density of institutional-grade business creates an environment where the expectations for financial rigor, compliance standards, and professional quality are set not by the city's modest size but by the global corporations that call it home. When your neighbor is Berkshire Hathaway and your logistics partner is Union Pacific, the bar for how you run your finance function is set considerably higher than it would be in a typical midsized city.
The economic pillars of Omaha are distinct and deeply rooted. Insurance and financial services dominate: Mutual of Omaha, along with dozens of smaller carriers, agencies, managing general agents, and insurance services companies, forms an ecosystem that extends far beyond the big names. Union Pacific's headquarters anchors a logistics and transportation sector that includes trucking companies, warehousing operations, and freight brokers leveraging Omaha's position at the geographic center of the continental United States. Food processing has defined Nebraska's economy for over a century—ConAgra Brands (now Conagra) was founded here, and companies like Scoular, Gavilon (now part of Viterra), and dozens of regional processors and commodity traders continue to move agricultural products from farm to table through Omaha. And the healthcare sector, led by Nebraska Medicine and CHI Health, serves a regional population that extends well beyond the metro into rural Nebraska, Iowa, and South Dakota.
For business owners managing $5M to $50M in revenue in this market, the central tension is clear: Omaha offers a low cost of doing business (commercial rents, labor costs, and utilities all run well below national averages), but the companies you sell to, partner with, and compete against operate at Fortune 500 standards. A food processor selling to Costco or Walmart must meet enterprise-grade vendor compliance requirements. An insurance services company working with Mutual of Omaha must maintain audit-ready financials. A trucking company hauling for Union Pacific must demonstrate financial stability and operational controls. The gap between small-business accounting and institutional-quality financial infrastructure is where Omaha companies either earn their place in the supply chain or get left behind.
5 Fortune 500
Headquarters
Highest per-capita concentration
Union Pacific
Railroad HQ
Nation's largest railroad
Berkshire Hathaway
World HQ
$900B+ market cap
Insurance and Financial Services: Navigating Dual Reporting Standards
Omaha's insurance industry creates a financial reporting environment unlike any other. Companies operating in this ecosystem—whether they are insurance carriers, managing general agents (MGAs), third-party administrators, claims processing firms, or technology vendors serving insurers—face regulatory requirements that general-practice accountants rarely understand at the depth required. Insurance carriers must maintain financial statements under both Statutory Accounting Principles (SAP), which are prescribed by state insurance departments and prioritize solvency, and Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP), which investors and lenders expect. These two frameworks can produce materially different financial pictures of the same company, and misunderstanding the differences can lead to regulatory problems, investor confusion, or both.
For MGAs and insurance agencies—companies that may not carry risk themselves but operate deep within the insurance value chain—the financial challenges are different but equally demanding. Commission revenue recognition can be complex when policies are written on a multi-year basis or when contingent commissions depend on loss ratio performance. Premium trust accounting, where agencies hold policyholder premiums in fiduciary accounts before remitting them to carriers, must be managed with precision because commingling trust funds with operating funds is a regulatory violation that can result in license revocation. And the cycle of cash flow in an insurance agency is inherently lumpy: large commercial renewals cluster around specific dates, new business production varies by season, and carrier payments on earned commissions can lag 60 to 90 days.
The Berkshire Hathaway effect amplifies these dynamics. Dozens of Omaha-area companies operate as vendors, partners, or competitors to Berkshire subsidiaries like GEICO, General Re, and National Indemnity. These relationships come with due diligence expectations: Berkshire companies expect their partners to maintain audited financial statements, carry appropriate insurance coverage, and demonstrate financial controls that can withstand scrutiny. For a growing insurance services company at $5M to $20M in revenue, meeting these expectations while managing the day-to-day complexity of insurance accounting requires finance leadership that operates at an institutional level—not a part-time bookkeeper who also handles three other small businesses.
Food Processing: Commodity Exposure and Margin Management
Nebraska produces more red meat per capita than any other state, and Omaha has been the commercial gateway for that production for over 150 years. Today's food processing industry is more sophisticated than the stockyards of the past, but the fundamental financial challenge remains the same: your input costs are determined by commodity markets you cannot control, and your output prices are constrained by retail and food service customers with enormous bargaining power. A meat processor buying cattle at fluctuating live-weight prices and selling boxed beef to grocery chains at contracted prices operates on margins that can swing from 8% to negative in a single month depending on the spread between input and output.
Managing this exposure requires financial systems that most growing food companies do not have when they first reach the $5M to $20M revenue range. Cost-of-goods tracking must account for yield losses (the percentage of a live animal that becomes saleable product), by-product revenue (hides, offal, rendered fats), and the grade mix that determines whether a carcass sells at premium or discount pricing. Inventory valuation is particularly complex in food processing because raw materials, work-in-process, and finished goods all have different values that fluctuate with market conditions, and USDA regulations on food safety and traceability add record-keeping requirements that feed directly into the accounting system. For a grain trader or commodity handler, the added complexity of forward contracts, basis risk, and margin calls on futures positions makes the financial management challenge even more acute.
Working capital management is where food processing companies live or die. The production cycle—from purchasing raw materials to processing, packaging, shipping, and collecting payment—can stretch 60 to 90 days, and during that period, the company is carrying the full cost of production on its balance sheet. A $15M processor might need $3M to $4M in revolving credit just to fund its working capital cycle, and the terms of that credit facility (advance rates, borrowing base calculations, covenants) are directly tied to the quality of the company's financial reporting. Lenders to food processing companies expect detailed inventory aging reports, margin analyses by product line, and cash flow forecasts that account for seasonal production patterns. Delivering these reports accurately and on time is not just good practice—it is what keeps the credit line available.
Logistics and Transportation: The Crossroads Advantage
Omaha's geographic position at the center of the continental United States makes it a natural logistics hub, and Union Pacific's headquarters here has attracted a concentration of trucking, warehousing, and freight brokerage companies that leverage rail-to-truck intermodal connections. The Werner Enterprises headquarters in Omaha reinforces the city's position as a transportation industry center. For logistics companies generating $5M to $50M in revenue, the financial management challenges are defined by the asset-intensive nature of the business and the razor-thin margins that characterize the industry.
A trucking company's balance sheet is dominated by its fleet. Tractors costing $150,000 to $200,000 each and trailers at $30,000 to $50,000 represent capital commitments that must be managed through a continuous cycle of acquisition, depreciation, maintenance, and disposition. The lease-versus-buy decision on equipment is a financial modeling exercise that depends on interest rates, tax depreciation schedules, maintenance cost curves, and the company's utilization rates. Fleet age management—determining the optimal time to cycle out older equipment before maintenance costs exceed the savings from lower monthly payments—can save hundreds of thousands of dollars annually for a company running 50 or more trucks. But making these decisions requires cost-per-mile data at the individual unit level, which most growing trucking companies do not track with enough precision.
Freight brokerage and third-party logistics companies face a different financial profile: asset-light but cash-flow-intensive. A broker earns the spread between what a shipper pays and what a carrier charges, and managing that spread across thousands of individual loads per month requires real-time visibility into margin by lane, customer, and carrier. Cash flow timing is critical because brokers typically pay carriers on 30-day terms but may not collect from shippers for 45 to 60 days, creating a permanent working capital gap that grows proportionally with revenue. Factoring (selling receivables at a discount for immediate cash) is common in the industry but expensive, and the decision of when to use factoring versus a traditional credit line versus customer prepayment terms is a financial optimization problem that directly affects profitability.
Nebraska's Tax Environment and Business Incentives
Nebraska's tax environment is moderate by national standards but contains enough complexity to create meaningful optimization opportunities for growing businesses. The state levies a corporate income tax at graduated rates—5.58% on the first $100,000 of taxable income and 7.25% on income above that threshold. Sales tax in the Omaha metro runs at 7%, with exemptions for manufacturing equipment and certain agricultural inputs. And Nebraska is one of a shrinking number of states that impose a personal property tax on business equipment (tangible personal property), requiring annual filings that list every piece of equipment a company owns along with its assessed value. For a logistics company with a large fleet or a manufacturer with a production floor full of machinery, this personal property tax can represent a five-figure annual obligation that many out-of-state businesses are surprised to encounter.
On the incentive side, Nebraska offers several programs that can meaningfully reduce the effective tax burden for growing companies. The ImagiNE Nebraska Act, which replaced the Nebraska Advantage Act, provides refundable tax credits and sales tax exemptions for businesses that invest in the state and create qualifying jobs. The credits can be substantial—up to 10% of new investment and per-employee credits that vary by wage level and location. But qualifying requires meeting specific thresholds for job creation, wage levels, and investment amounts, and the application process demands detailed documentation of both planned and actual activity. Companies that qualify can use the credits to offset income tax, sales tax, and personal property tax obligations, creating a compound benefit that reduces the overall cost of growth.
For business owners evaluating entity structure, Nebraska's treatment of pass-through entities adds another consideration. S-corporations and partnerships pass income through to individual owners, who then pay Nebraska personal income tax at rates up to 6.64%. For high-earning business owners, the interplay between the corporate income tax rate and the personal income tax rate—combined with federal tax treatment of pass-through income under Section 199A—creates an entity structuring decision that can save tens of thousands of dollars annually when optimized correctly. This is exactly the kind of strategic tax planning that separates a compliance-oriented accounting firm from a finance partner that actively works to minimize your tax burden.
What Growing Omaha Businesses Need from a Finance Partner
The defining characteristic of doing business in Omaha is the expectation of institutional quality in a city-sized market. When your customers include Berkshire Hathaway subsidiaries, when your logistics partner is the nation's largest railroad, and when your industry peers include globally recognized insurance carriers, the financial infrastructure of your business must meet standards that would be familiar to a Fortune 500 company. Audited financial statements, clean internal controls, detailed management reporting, and the ability to answer due diligence questions from sophisticated counterparties are not aspirational goals in Omaha—they are table stakes for participating in the local economy at any meaningful scale.
At the same time, most $5M to $50M businesses in Omaha cannot justify the cost of a full-time CFO, controller, and accounting team staffed with specialists in insurance accounting, food processing cost management, or logistics financial analysis. The talent exists in Omaha—the Fortune 500 companies train it—but hiring it away from Berkshire or Union Pacific requires compensation packages that are disproportionate to what a $15M company can sustain. This creates a structural gap: the financial requirements demand senior-level expertise, but the cost structure of a growing company cannot support it in-house.
An outsourced finance team bridges this gap by providing the institutional-quality financial leadership that Omaha's business environment demands at a cost structure that growing companies can afford. For an insurance services company, that means a controller who understands premium trust accounting and statutory reporting working alongside a CFO who can model growth scenarios and negotiate with carriers. For a food processor, it means cost accounting that tracks margins by product line at the yield level and cash flow forecasting that accounts for commodity price movements and seasonal production patterns. For a logistics company, it means fleet cost analysis, customer profitability modeling, and working capital optimization from a team that has managed the same dynamics across dozens of similar businesses. The result is financial infrastructure that matches the market's expectations without the overhead that would erode the cost advantages that make Omaha attractive in the first place.
Scale Your Omaha Business with Confidence
Get finance leadership that understands insurance compliance, commodity-driven margins, logistics economics, and the institutional standards that Omaha's Fortune 500 ecosystem demands. We work with Omaha businesses from $5M to $50M in revenue.