Your Back Office: Full-Service Bookkeeping for Growing Texas Businesses
The back office a company your size is supposed to have — bookkeeping, payroll, AP/AR, and controller-level oversight, for one flat monthly price.
The Business Outgrew the Setup That Built It.
Almost every client who hands us their back office arrives at the same moment, and it isn't a crisis — it's a ceiling. Revenue is up, headcount is up, there are more jobs or locations or entities than there were. And the back office still runs the way it ran when the company was half this size.
Decisions wait on information
Not because anyone is slow. Because the number that would settle the question has to be assembled by hand first, and by then the moment has moved.
No one can answer straight
Ask what a job made, what a provider produced, or what you'll have in the bank in three weeks, and the honest answer is that somebody will have to go look.
You are still the system
You know where everything is, which means the business cannot move faster than you can personally keep up. That's a ceiling with your name on it.
You don't need someone to record what happened. You need the back office a company your size is supposed to have.
Nothing has broken, exactly. That's what makes it hard to see. It isn't a bookkeeping problem — it's a structural one. That's what a back office is for.
BBS has helped us take our business to the next level. Matt, Emily and team have made us feel like their only priority from day one. We 100% would not be where we are today without their support.
Two Situations, Over and Over
In practice, nearly every back office engagement starts with one of these. If either one describes your week, this is the page you were looking for.
You're Stuck, and You Can't See Why
The business is trying to get to the next level and something keeps holding it there. Growth is possible on paper — the work is available, the demand is real — but every attempt to push forward runs into the same wall.
Usually the wall is information. You can't tell which work is actually profitable, so you can't tell which work to chase. You can't see cash far enough ahead to commit to a hire or a truck or a second location. The decision isn't hard. The number you'd need to make it doesn't exist yet.
We're busier than we've ever been and I still can't tell you if this was a good year.
The Job Outgrew the People Doing It
You have someone handling the books. They may be loyal, hardworking, and genuinely trying. But what this business needs now is not what it needed when they started, and the gap is widening.
This is the hardest one to say out loud, so we'll say it plainly: it is usually not a character problem. A company at twenty-five employees needs review, controls, and oversight that a company at six did not. Very few people grow into that role on their own, because nobody ever taught them what it looks like.
I don't think they're doing anything wrong. I just don't think they know what they don't know.
You're Not Hiring a Bookkeeper. You're Hiring a Team.
Most owners price us against another bookkeeper, and that comparison is off by a whole category. What you actually get is your back office team — the department a mid-sized company staffs internally, covering five distinct roles, supervised, for one monthly fee. Here is every seat on it.
Transaction Work
The BookkeeperCoded and allocated weekly, reconciled monthly. Weekly matters more than it sounds: a month-old error is a correction, but a week-old error is still a decision you can act on.
Job, class, location, provider, or entity allocation happens as the transaction is recorded — not reconstructed at close, which is where most of the inaccuracy in small-business books comes from. More on the mechanics in bookkeeping.
Payroll & Compliance
The Payroll AdministratorProcessing, filings, new hires, terminations, multi-state registration where it applies, and the reporting that has to tie back to what the ledger says about wages.
Where prevailing-wage work is involved, that reporting is handled too. Details on payroll services.
Money In, Money Out
The AP & Collections ClerkBills entered, approved on your schedule, and paid on terms rather than on panic. Invoices out on time, aging watched by age rather than by total, and follow-up that happens before a customer stops answering the phone.
This is the role owners most often absorb personally and most underestimate the cost of. See AP and AR operations.
Review & Oversight
The ControllerThis is the role a single bookkeeper hire almost never covers, and it's the one that changes outcomes. Somebody has to review the work rather than perform it — own the close, check the balance sheet, catch the thing the ledger is technically recording but effectively hiding.
Intercompany balances that don't net to zero. A loan booked as income. Credit balances sitting in receivables. Margin drifting on a job that hasn't closed yet. None of that surfaces without someone whose job is to look. See reporting and advisory.
Reporting & the Monthly Conversation
The Standing MeetingA reporting package built for how your business actually makes money — by job, by provider, by truck, by location, by entity — not a generic P&L with your name at the top.
And a conversation about it, on a schedule, with someone who read it before the call. Reports nobody walks you through are just files.
Why every seat is listed separately: because when owners compare us to a single hire, they're comparing five jobs to one. The honest comparison isn't our fee against a bookkeeper's salary — it's our fee against what it costs to build, staff, and manage this team yourself, including the seats you'd still be filling personally.
We Teach You to Operate Like You're Already Larger.
This is the part that's hard to put in a service list, and it's the reason back office clients stay. Companies that break through a ceiling almost always start behaving like the next size up before they get there. The discipline comes first; the growth follows it.
A close that actually closes
Months that end, get reviewed, and stay closed. Not a file that's still moving in March. It sounds procedural until the first time you can trust a comparison between two quarters.
Decisions made on numbers, not instinct
Your instincts got the business here and they're worth something. But at a certain size, instinct alone starts making expensive mistakes that a report would have caught.
A business that runs without you in every loop
If the books only work because you personally chase them, you are the constraint. Larger companies separate doing the work from reviewing it. That separation is what lets them scale.
The First Ninety Days
Handing over a back office is not a switch you flip. Inherited books almost always need work before they can be relied on, and we'd rather tell you that up front than discover it in month four.
Find Out What's Actually There
Before anything gets rebuilt, we establish what's true today.
- Every account reconciled to a real statement
- Balance sheet reviewed line by line
- Intercompany and related-party balances traced
- A written list of what we found, including anything you won't enjoy reading
Build the Operating Rhythm
The department starts running on a schedule instead of on requests.
- Weekly coding and allocation live
- Payroll and filings moved over cleanly
- AP approval flow and AR follow-up in place
- Chart of accounts restructured to match how you actually make money
Make It Useful
Clean books are the prerequisite, not the point. This is where it starts paying.
- First real reporting package, built for your business
- The four numbers you should get in under a minute, on demand
- Standing monthly review on the calendar
- Controller review cycle running
What Moves to Us, and What Never Will
Outsourcing works when the boundary is explicit. Vagueness here is how engagements go wrong, so this is stated plainly rather than left to be discovered.
Moves to Us
You stop owning these entirely.- Weekly transaction coding, allocation, and monthly reconciliation
- Payroll processing, filings, and wage reporting
- Accounts payable entry, approval routing, and payment scheduling
- Invoicing, receivables aging, and collections follow-up
- Month-end close and the review behind it
- Balance sheet integrity and controller-level oversight
- Monthly reporting package and the meeting about it
- Year-end preparation, organized and handed to your CPA
Stays Yours
These are decisions, not tasks. They don't outsource.- What you charge, and what work you take
- Who you hire and what you pay them
- Whether to approve a specific payment
- Every banking, lending, and legal relationship
- Tax returns and tax positions — those belong to your CPA
- Any attest, audit, or assurance work — we do not perform it
- Which vendors and subcontractors you work with
- The final call on every strategic decision
When This Is the Wrong Answer
It's the most involved thing we do and the most expensive. There are situations where it's genuinely not what you need, and saying so early saves everyone a bad year.
You need one thing fixed
If the real problem is payroll, or a receivables backlog, or two years of unreconciled books, take the single service instead. Buying the whole department to solve one problem is a waste of your money.
Price is the only variable
If the goal is the lowest possible monthly number, we will lose that comparison and we should. A department costs more than a data-entry service. That's the trade, and it isn't for everyone.
Nobody wants the answers
This only works if someone reads the reporting and acts on it. If the books are being kept to satisfy a lender or a filing deadline and nothing more, the oversight layer is money spent on something you won't use.
The business is genuinely simple
One entity, a handful of employees, one revenue stream, no job or provider costing. Solid monthly bookkeeping will serve you well and cost far less. Come back when the structure gets complicated.
If any of those describe you, say so on the call. We would rather scope you into the right service and keep you for a decade than sell you the largest one and lose you in a year. Either way, start at services to compare.
One Flat Monthly Price, Scoped Before We Begin
Nothing about the fee should be a surprise, and nothing about it should discourage you from picking up the phone.
Scoped, then quoted
We look at transaction volume, entity count, payroll complexity, and the condition of the current books before quoting anything. A number given before that is a guess, and guesses get revised upward.
Flat, and not metered
One monthly figure. Calls and questions are not billed separately and never counted — a client who avoids calling because of the meter is a client heading for an expensive surprise.
Revisited when you change
If you add an entity, double headcount, or take on a materially different kind of work, the scope gets re-examined openly. We'd rather have that conversation than quietly absorb it or quietly cut corners.
Cleanup of existing books, where it's needed, is quoted separately from the ongoing monthly fee. It is one-time work with a defined end, and bundling it into a recurring price would mean charging you for it forever.
What We See, Over and Over
No before-and-after chart here, because the businesses that call us weren't measuring the “before” — that's usually the reason they called. What we can tell you is what we walk into, and what changes.
The Books Were Being Kept. They Weren't Being Kept Right.
The most common thing we inherit is a set of books maintained faithfully, on time, by someone who was never taught the structural side of the job. Day-to-day transactions look fine. The problems are underneath.
What we findA chart of accounts that grew by accident rather than design — accounts added one at a time as needs came up, until nothing rolls up into a number anyone can use. And balance sheet activity handled as though it were an expense: loan principal booked as income, credit balances sitting in receivables, fixed assets expensed, intercompany transfers left as unexplained cash.
A P&L built on that will look plausible and be wrong. It's also the kind of wrong that compounds quietly for years, because nothing about it triggers an error message.
Cost of goods sold is the other one we see misused constantly — job costs, materials, and production labor sitting in general expense accounts instead of COGS. That miscoding has consequences beyond a messy report, and we get into those below.
What changesThe chart of accounts gets rebuilt around how the business actually makes money, so reports roll up instead of sprawling. COGS gets separated from operating expense properly. The balance sheet gets reviewed line by line and corrected. Then somebody keeps reviewing it — which is the part that was missing, not the effort.
He Didn't Need Better Reports. He Needed His Week Back.
In commercial construction the owner is usually the most valuable salesperson the company has, and often the only one. He's also frequently the estimator, the problem-solver, and — by default, at night and on weekends — the back office.
What we findAdministrative work expanding to fill exactly the hours that should have gone into winning the next job. Invoices going out late because the person who has to send them was on a site all day. Payables handled reactively. Not one dramatic failure, just a steady tax on the owner's attention.
What changesWe take the entire administrative load — payroll, payables, invoicing and collections, close, reporting — and run it in the background on a schedule. The owner stops spending evenings on paperwork and starts spending days in front of general contractors.
That shift has, for more than one client in this space, been followed by substantial growth. In a couple of cases the business has roughly doubled its revenue.
Tracking What You're Owed Breaks Before Anything Else Does.
At fifteen customers an owner carries receivables in his head, and it works. At sixty it does not, and the failure is gradual enough that nobody names the moment it happened.
What we findAging watched as a single total rather than by age — which hides a ninety-day problem inside a comfortable-looking number. Retainage tracked informally or not at all. Invoices that went out but were never followed up because following up was nobody's actual job. And work completed, sometimes months earlier, that was simply never billed.
Scale is what makes this expensive. The same informal process that loses one invoice at fifteen customers loses several at sixty, and by then the oldest ones are the hardest to collect.
What changesAging gets watched by bucket, with follow-up on a schedule instead of on remembering. Retainage gets tracked as its own balance. Somebody owns collections as a named responsibility. See AP and AR operations.
We recommend Emily, Matt, and their team to anyone in the construction industry. We brought them on when we needed help the most, and they made the entire transition feel seamless.
They handle the office work for me. One less stressful thing I don't have to worry about. Their communication is Top Notch! You have a forever client.
They completely revamped our books from a previous firm and took the time to meet with us both onsite and online. They've been phenomenal!
Unedited Google reviews. We've grown almost entirely on referrals, which is the only reason we can say that.
Where Bookkeeping Stops Being Internal and Turns Into a Bill
Two areas where the structure of your books reaches outside the company. Both arrive as a cost, both tend to arrive at the worst possible time, and neither one shows up as an error in your software. We handle both, including sitting through the audits.
Payroll Gets Harder at Specific Headcounts, Not Gradually.
Payroll compliance doesn't scale smoothly with the business. It steps. Obligations that genuinely did not apply to you last year apply the moment you cross a line — and the line is usually crossed during a good year, when nobody is reading regulations.
What we findThe most commonly missed one: at an average of 50 or more full-time and full-time-equivalent employees during the prior calendar year, an employer becomes an Applicable Large Employer under the Affordable Care Act, which brings employer shared-responsibility provisions and annual IRS information reporting. It's measured on a twelve-month average of the previous year, so a company can be subject to it before anyone realizes the threshold was passed.
Growing across state lines creates its own version of this — registration and withholding obligations in each new state, triggered by where employees actually work.
What changesHeadcount gets tracked against the thresholds that matter as it moves, not discovered afterward, and payroll and filings are handled so what's on the books matches what was reported. Details on payroll services.
Your Books Set Your Insurance Premium. Most Owners Don't Know That.
General liability and workers' compensation premiums are audited against your actual payroll and cost records. The audit is where bookkeeping structure stops being an internal matter and turns into a bill.
What we findCosts classified in ways that place labor in a higher-rated bucket than it belongs in. And the expensive one in construction: subcontractors who can't produce a current certificate of insurance — because an uninsured sub can be picked up on your policy at audit and charged to you as though they were your employees.
The same COGS miscoding matters here for a second reason. Costs tied to producing real property can qualify as cost of goods sold under the Texas franchise tax, which is one of four permitted ways to compute margin. If those costs were never separated as COGS in the books, that method can't be evaluated at all — your CPA can only work with what the records actually contain.
What changesCOIs get collected and tracked before the work starts rather than chased at audit. Cost classification gets built to survive review. And we handle the audits themselves. We have sat through general liability and workers' compensation audits every year we have been in business — since 2021 — and we do several of them annually. We produce the records, we answer the auditor's questions, and the owner does not have to stop working to assemble a year of documentation.
Full detail on what an auditor requests, what drives an additional premium, and how we handle it is on insurance audit support.
We Work With What You Already Run
Taking over a back office does not require you to replace the software your field or front desk already knows. What it requires is that those systems actually tie to the ledger — which is usually the part that was never finished.
QuickBooks Online
Where the ledger lives. Set up so the class, job, and location structure matches how your business is actually organized.
Field & job software
Knowify, Service Pro, and similar systems — integrated so routes, stops, jobs, and invoices reach the books without hand entry.
Payroll platforms
Whatever you run today, or a move to something that fits better. Either way, wages on the books tie to what was filed.
Practice & industry systems
Practice management, POS, property management. We reconcile to them rather than asking you to abandon them.
What We Are, and What We Are Not
Bulverde Business Solutions is a bookkeeping and financial operations firm. We are not a CPA firm and not a law firm. We do not prepare tax returns, render tax opinions, represent clients before taxing authorities, or perform any audit, review, attest, or assurance engagement.
Your back office includes preparing and organizing your year-end records so your CPA receives closed, reconciled, reviewed books instead of a file that's still moving. That handoff is part of the value — but the return itself, and the tax positions in it, belong to your CPA. If you don't have one, we're glad to tell you what to look for.
Nothing on this page is tax, legal, or investment advice.
Questions Owners Actually Ask
These are the real ones, including the uncomfortable ones.
How is this different from just hiring a bookkeeper?
A bookkeeper is one seat on the back office team described above. This is all five, plus the supervision layer that reviews the work rather than performing it. A single hire gives you transaction work and no oversight — which means when something is recorded wrong, there is nobody whose job it is to catch it.
It also doesn't stop. Coverage during vacation, illness, and turnover is our problem rather than yours, and continuity doesn't reset every time someone leaves.
I already have a bookkeeper. What happens to them?
That's your call entirely, and it goes both ways more often than people expect. Sometimes the person stays and moves into the work they're genuinely good at — field paperwork, customer contact, scheduling — while we take the ledger, oversight, and reporting. Sometimes the role ends. We'll tell you honestly what we see, and we won't pretend the awkward version isn't sometimes the right one.
What we won't do is quietly work around someone. If they stay, they need to know we're here and what each side owns.
What does it cost?
It's quoted after scoping, because transaction volume, entity count, payroll complexity, and the current condition of the books all move the number substantially. A figure quoted before we've looked would be a guess, and guesses get revised upward once reality shows up.
What we can tell you is the shape: one flat monthly price, agreed before we start, with calls and questions included rather than metered.
Is this cheaper than hiring in-house?
Usually, but that isn't the honest way to frame it, and we'd rather not oversell. Compared against one bookkeeper's salary, we may cost more. Compared against the department that actually delivers all five roles — plus benefits, payroll taxes, training, coverage, turnover, and the management time you'd spend supervising it — it's typically well under.
The part owners leave out of the comparison is their own time. If you are currently the controller, that hour has a cost even though nobody invoices you for it.
My books are a mess. Is that a problem?
It's extremely common and it's not disqualifying. It does affect sequencing: we can't build reliable reporting on an unreliable foundation, so cleanup comes first and gets quoted separately as one-time work with a defined end.
We'd rather tell you in week two that the last eighteen months need rework than hand you a confident-looking report built on numbers we don't trust.
How long before this actually helps?
Operationally, within the first month — payroll runs, bills get paid on terms, invoices go out. The part most owners are buying, which is being able to see the business clearly, generally lands in the sixty-to-ninety day range. Sooner if the existing books are in decent shape, later if cleanup is substantial.
Do you handle multi-entity structures?
Yes, and it's one of the more common reasons owners outgrow a single bookkeeper. Multiple entities mean intercompany balances that have to net to zero, management fees and related-party rent recorded on both sides, and consolidated reporting that separates the entities cleanly.
Unreconciled intercompany activity is the single most frequent mess we inherit. It's also the one that causes the most trouble at year end.
Do we have to change software?
No. We work with QuickBooks Online as the ledger and integrate what you already run in the field or at the front desk. If something genuinely can't support the business, we'll say so and explain why — but “you have to move to our stack” is not how we start.
Who exactly will we be working with?
A named team, not a ticket queue. You'll know who handles your transaction work, who runs your payroll, and who does the controller review — and you can contact them directly. The monthly review is with someone who read your reporting before the call.
Do you handle our general liability and workers' compensation audits?
Yes, and it's one of the more useful things we take off an owner's desk. We've handled general liability and workers' compensation audits every year we've been in business — since 2021 — and we do several of them a year.
We produce the records the auditor asks for and answer the questions, so nobody has to stop working to assemble a year of documentation on short notice. We also collect and track subcontractor certificates of insurance as the work happens, because a sub who can't produce a current COI at audit can be picked up on your policy and charged to you. There is a fuller explanation on insurance audit support.
Do you replace our CPA?
No, and we're not able to. We are not a CPA firm. We do not prepare returns, give tax opinions, or perform audit or attest work. What we do is make your CPA's job straightforward by handing over books that are closed, reconciled, and reviewed — which usually reduces what they have to charge you for cleanup at year end.
What if we grow, or shrink?
The scope gets revisited openly in either direction. Adding an entity or doubling headcount changes the work, and so does contracting. We'd rather reprice honestly than absorb it silently until the service quietly degrades.
Are we locked into a long contract?
No. The engagement is monthly. We've grown almost entirely on referrals, which only works if clients stay because the work is good rather than because leaving is difficult.
Based in Bulverde. Working Across Texas.
Your back office runs remotely by design — it has to, because the work is continuous rather than scheduled around visits. Most clients are within an hour of us, and we're on site when it's worth being on site.
Tell Us Where You're Stuck.
The first conversation is about your situation, not our packages. If a full back office isn't the right answer we'll tell you that on the call and point you at what is.
(830) 666-0417 · Bulverde, Texas · Not a CPA firm.
