Outsourced CFO & Accounting Services in San Antonio
Financial leadership built for Military City USA. Expert outsourced finance for defense contractors, cybersecurity companies, healthcare providers, and construction firms navigating DCAA compliance, Texas franchise tax strategy, and one of the fastest-growing metros in America.
The San Antonio Business Landscape
San Antonio earns its "Military City USA" designation not through sentiment but through sheer economic force. Joint Base San Antonio is the largest joint military installation in the Department of Defense, encompassing Fort Sam Houston, Lackland Air Force Base, Randolph Air Force Base, Camp Bullis, and Camp Stanley. More than 80,000 military personnel, civilian employees, and dependents operate across these installations, generating an annual economic impact that exceeds $50 billion in the greater San Antonio region. This concentration of defense activity has attracted a dense ecosystem of government contractors, IT services firms, cybersecurity companies, logistics providers, and military healthcare support businesses—many of them in the $5M to $50M revenue range where growth outpaces the internal finance capacity to manage it.
But San Antonio's economy extends well beyond the base gates. The city is one of the largest healthcare markets in Texas, with University Health System, Methodist Healthcare System, Baptist Health System, and the South Texas Medical Center campus forming a medical corridor that employs over 100,000 people. The San Antonio River Walk and the historic Alamo anchor a tourism sector that draws 35 million visitors annually. And a construction boom fueled by the metro area's population growth—San Antonio has added roughly 300,000 residents over the past decade, pushing the metro past 2.6 million—means contractors and developers are busier than they have been in a generation.
For business owners in this environment, San Antonio offers a rare combination: a large, diversified economy with growth rates typically seen in much smaller cities, operating costs well below coastal metros, and Texas's zero state income tax. The trade-off is that the industries driving that growth—defense contracting, cybersecurity, healthcare, construction—each carry specialized financial management requirements that generic accounting and bookkeeping services cannot adequately address. A $15M defense contractor needs DCAA-compliant cost accounting. A $10M healthcare services company needs revenue cycle optimization. A $20M general contractor needs real-time job costing. And all of them need someone who understands how the Texas franchise tax actually works.
Joint Base SA
Largest in DoD
5 installations, 80,000+ personnel
35 Million
Annual Visitors
River Walk & Alamo tourism
$0 State
Income Tax
Texas advantage for growing companies
Defense Contracting and DCAA Compliance
The financial management requirements for defense contractors in San Antonio go far beyond what a standard accounting firm handles. The Defense Contract Audit Agency imposes strict requirements on how companies track, allocate, and report costs on government contracts. Every direct cost must be tied to a specific contract. Indirect costs—overhead, general and administrative expenses, fringe benefits—must be pooled and allocated using consistent, defensible methodologies. Timekeeping systems must capture labor hours by contract with enough granularity to withstand audit scrutiny. And each year, contractors must prepare and submit an incurred cost submission that reconciles their actual indirect rates against the provisional rates they billed throughout the year.
For a growing defense contractor in the $5M to $25M range, the compliance burden is disproportionately heavy relative to the size of the finance team. A single DCAA audit finding can trigger a cascade of consequences: disallowed costs that must be repaid, contract modifications that reduce future billing rates, or—in severe cases—suspension or debarment from future government contracting. Companies that mix government and commercial work face additional complexity because the accounting systems must keep these revenue streams completely separate while still producing consolidated financial statements that give the owner a clear picture of overall business health.
San Antonio's defense contractor community is particularly diverse in the types of contracts it manages. Firms supporting Lackland's cyber operations may hold cost-reimbursement contracts where accurate indirect rate management directly determines profitability. Companies providing base operations support at Fort Sam Houston may work under firm-fixed-price contracts where the challenge is managing actual costs against a fixed revenue ceiling. IT services providers supporting Randolph's pilot training systems may operate under time-and-materials contracts. Each contract type has different financial management requirements, and a company holding a portfolio of mixed contract types needs a finance function that can manage all of them simultaneously.
Cybersecurity Corridor: Port San Antonio and Beyond
San Antonio has quietly become one of the most important cybersecurity hubs in the United States. The city hosts the NSA Texas cryptologic center, the 24th Air Force (now part of Sixteenth Air Force) responsible for Air Force cyber operations, the Defense Intelligence Agency's Texas campus, and the Army Futures Command's cyber directorate. This military cyber concentration has spawned a civilian cybersecurity industry centered around Port San Antonio—a 1,900-acre technology and innovation campus on the former Kelly Air Force Base—and scattered throughout the city's north side near JBSA-Lackland.
Cybersecurity companies face financial challenges that are distinct from traditional IT services firms. The cost of maintaining security clearances is substantial—cleared personnel command salary premiums of 20% to 40% above their uncleared counterparts, and the facility security infrastructure required to handle classified work (SCIFs, secure networks, compliance officers) represents significant fixed overhead. Companies pursuing Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification must invest in assessment preparation, remediation of gaps, and ongoing compliance monitoring, with costs that can range from $50,000 to $500,000 depending on the certification level required. These are not optional expenses; without CMMC certification, a company cannot bid on an increasing number of DoD contracts.
For a cybersecurity company growing from $5M to $20M, the financial planning challenge is forecasting the return on these compliance investments. How many new contract opportunities does CMMC Level 2 certification open? What is the break-even timeline on building a SCIF? How should you price bids to recover the cost of maintaining cleared personnel during bench time between contracts? These questions require financial modeling that connects operational decisions to their P&L impact—not just tracking what has already been spent, but projecting whether planned investments will generate adequate returns.
Healthcare in the South Texas Medical Center
San Antonio's South Texas Medical Center is one of the largest medical complexes in the state, spanning 900 acres and housing University Health System, Methodist Hospital, Christus Santa Rosa, and numerous specialty practices and medical offices. Brooke Army Medical Center at Fort Sam Houston adds military healthcare into the mix, creating one of the most diverse healthcare economies in the country. For private practices, physician groups, and healthcare services companies between $5M and $30M, the market offers strong patient demand driven by a metro population that continues to grow rapidly—but the competitive and regulatory landscape requires sophisticated financial management.
Revenue cycle management in San Antonio's healthcare market has specific characteristics that affect cash flow. The payer mix includes a significant Tricare population from the military installations, a Medicaid population that is larger than the national average due to South Texas demographics, and commercial insurance dominated by Blue Cross Blue Shield of Texas and UnitedHealthcare. Each payer has different reimbursement rates, prior authorization requirements, denial patterns, and payment timelines. A growing practice that doesn't analyze its payer mix at the procedure-code level and negotiate contracts based on actual cost-to-collect data is almost certainly underperforming financially relative to its clinical volume.
Expansion planning is especially critical in a metro that is adding population as quickly as San Antonio. Deciding where to open a new clinic location requires demographic analysis, competitive mapping, payer mix projection, and financial modeling that accounts for the 12- to 18-month ramp-up period before a new location reaches break-even patient volume. Hiring physicians is a capital-intensive decision: recruitment costs, signing bonuses, guaranteed compensation during the ramp-up period, and malpractice insurance premiums can represent a $300,000 to $600,000 commitment before a new provider generates a dollar of net revenue. A finance team that can model these investments accurately is the difference between profitable growth and growth that dilutes the entire organization's margins.
Texas Franchise Tax: Not as Simple as "No Income Tax"
Business owners who relocate to Texas or expand into the state often assume that "no state income tax" means no state-level business tax. This is incorrect. Texas levies a franchise tax—officially called the margin tax—on every business entity operating in the state. The tax applies to the lesser of 70% of total revenue, total revenue minus cost of goods sold, total revenue minus total compensation, or $1 million. The rate is 0.375% for qualified wholesalers and retailers and 0.75% for all other businesses. For a $20M services company, the franchise tax liability can exceed $100,000 annually—a material amount that must be factored into pricing, margin calculations, and growth planning.
The franchise tax's method of calculation creates strategic planning opportunities that many business owners miss. Companies with high labor costs relative to revenue can often minimize their tax by electing the compensation deduction method. Companies with significant cost of goods sold may benefit from the COGS deduction, but the definition of COGS under the Texas franchise tax is narrower than the federal definition, which catches unprepared business owners. The choice between calculation methods can vary from year to year as a company's cost structure evolves, making this an area where proactive analysis pays for itself many times over.
Property tax is the other major tax consideration in San Antonio. Bexar County property tax rates are among the higher in Texas, and commercial property—including business personal property like equipment, vehicles, and inventory—is assessed annually. Growing companies that are adding facilities, equipment, or vehicle fleets in San Antonio need to budget for property tax exposure that increases with every asset acquisition. Property tax protest strategies, which can yield 10% to 20% reductions in assessed values, are commonly used by sophisticated business owners but require organized financial records and timely filing—another area where professional finance leadership pays dividends.
What Growing San Antonio Businesses Need from a Finance Partner
San Antonio's economy rewards specialization. The defense contractors who win JBSA contracts are the ones with airtight compliance systems. The healthcare companies that expand profitably are the ones with precise revenue cycle management and expansion modeling. The construction firms that survive and thrive in a competitive bidding environment are the ones with meticulous job costing and bonding capacity management. In every case, the quality of financial management is not peripheral to success—it is central to it.
A finance partner serving San Antonio's business community needs to understand that this is a market where industries intersect in ways that create unusual complexity. A facilities maintenance company might serve both JBSA installations under government contracts and commercial real estate clients under standard service agreements—requiring dual accounting systems that keep government and commercial work separate. A healthcare IT company might provide cybersecurity services to military medical facilities under DCAA-auditable contracts while also selling commercially to civilian hospitals. These hybrid business models are common in San Antonio and demand financial infrastructure that can handle multiple compliance frameworks simultaneously.
The city's cost advantages make it possible to build a profitable business at margins that would be impossible in Houston, Dallas, or Austin. But those advantages only translate into results when they are managed proactively. A growing San Antonio company needs finance leadership that tracks margins by contract, by location, and by service line—not just at the aggregate level. It needs cash flow forecasting that accounts for the irregular payment timing of government contracts, the seasonal fluctuations of the tourism economy, and the ramp-up curves of healthcare expansion. And it needs tax strategy that goes beyond filing returns to actively minimizing the franchise tax, managing property tax exposure, and structuring the business for long-term efficiency.
Scale Your San Antonio Business with Confidence
Get finance leadership that understands DCAA compliance, cybersecurity contracting, healthcare revenue cycles, and the Texas tax environment. We work with San Antonio businesses from $5M to $50M in revenue.