01 · Monthly
Volume and entities, not revenue.
A one-truck shop and a $6M builder can move the same number of transactions. We price the work, not your size — extra entities and heavier volume raise it, and it never goes below the $159 we publish.
— · ↑↓ to move · ↵ to open
Texas contractors & service businesses
What it costs, before you talk to anyone.
Four questions. A real number in fifteen seconds. Then decide whether you want to call.
However far behind you are, it's fixable. Most people who call us are two to four years back. Nobody here is going to lecture you about it — we quote one fixed price and start.
Your ballpark4 questions
How many businesses or entities?LLCs, DBAs
1
How much runs through the bank?Per month
What shape are the books in?Be honest
Current1 yr2 yr3 yr+
Monthly, ongoing
$160–400/moBooks Right — flat monthly, month-to-month, no contract.
Catch-up, one time
$1,110–1,510One fixed quote for all 12 months. No hourly meter.
No email. No sign-up. Nothing follows you around.
- By the 10thBooks locked, every month
- One fixed priceQuoted in writing, no hourly meter
- Month to monthNo contract, leave whenever
- A real personAnswers when you call
Where that came from
The number isn't a hook. Here's the math behind it.
Most places make you get on a call to find out what they charge. Ours is on the screen, and so is the reasoning — because a price you can check is the only kind worth anything.
02 · Catch-up
The further back it goes, the cheaper each month gets.
The first three months bill at full rate — that's opening the file and finding out how you work. After that it steps down, and past a year the extra months are minimal. Repetition pays, and you get the savings.
03 · Where it stops
Past a point we stop guessing.
If the job is big enough that a range would be fiction, the tool says so and asks you to call instead of printing a five-figure guess. A number dressed up as a quote helps nobody.
Sound familiar?
You built the business. Nobody handed you the numbers.
The job's done. Was it worth it?
You bid it, worked it, got paid — and found out months later it barely cleared. Bad estimates, slow billing and loose change orders eat margin quietly, job after job.
Job costing — profit per job, not per year
Cash gets tight with no warning.
GCs paying in 60–90 days. Retainage. Draw schedules. You find out about a crunch the week it hits — and payroll doesn't wait.
13-week cash flow, updated monthly
The bank wants numbers you don't have.
Truck loan, line of credit, bonding capacity — all of it starts with a P&L and balance sheet that hold up. A spreadsheet gets you a polite no.
Lender-ready books, every single month
You're two, three, four years behind.
The shoebox. The truck console. The tax-time panic. It's more common than you think — and it's fixable for one fixed price, without the lecture.
Catch-Up Cleanup — one quote, no judgment
What flying blind costs
Blind is
expensive.
3–5%of revenue quietly lost to unbilled work, loose change orders and mispriced jobs
60–90days you float your customers when nobody is chasing the money
$0what the bank lends against numbers that don't hold up
The most expensive bookkeeper in Texas is a business owner doing it at 11 p.m.
The fix
Your whole money picture. Back in your hands.
Not software. Not a shoebox hand-off. A finance department, installed — in three layers.
01 · Books
Every transaction categorized, every account balanced, books locked by the 10th. The foundation.
02 · Insight
Job costing, 13-week cash flow, a four-number scorecard. You see problems a quarter out.
03 · Strategy
Budgets, pricing, lender and bonding packages — built and defended at the table with you.
The most expensive bookkeeper in Texas is a business owner doing it at 11 p.m.
Insight, made concrete
This is the chart that stops the 2 a.m. wake-ups.
Thirteen weeks of cash, forward. Money in from the jobs you've already billed, money out for payroll and material. Where the line dips under the floor is the week you'd have found out the hard way.
Projected cash on hand — next 13 weeks
Sample · a $2.4M mechanical contractor
Hover any week
Week 7 is the problem — two GC draws land late in the same window payroll runs twice. Seen in week one, it's a phone call. Seen in week seven, it's a line of credit at whatever rate they'll give you.
You don't need a bigger job. You need to know which ones already made money.What I tell every owner on the first call
Most contractors who call are growing and getting poorer at the same time. Revenue is up, the crew is busy, and there is less in the account than last year. That is almost never a sales problem.
- Two or three jobs are usually carrying the whole year
- One or two are quietly losing money on every ticket
- Nobody can tell which is which without job-level costing
Flat monthly pricing
Published, because you'd ask anyway.
Three tiers, one flat number each, month to month. Most contractors start on Books Right and move up when the job costing starts paying for itself.
Most start here
Books Right
$159/mo
Starting at · normally $300
- Monthly categorization and balancing
- Books locked by the 10th
- P&L, balance sheet, cash summary
- Your tax preparer gets clean files
What lands in your inbox every month
- By the 10th — last month closed, balanced and locked
- P&L and balance sheet — comparative to prior month and prior year
- Cash summary — what came in, what went out, what's sitting there
- A short note from me — anything in the numbers you should look at
Handled in the background
- Every bank, card and loan account balanced to the statement
- Transactions categorized to a chart of accounts built for your trade
- Vendor and customer records kept clean so the reports mean something
Month to month. No setup fee, no contract, no charge for asking a question. If you leave, the file is yours and we hand it over the same week.
CFO Core
$1,325/mo
Starting at · normally $1,500
- Everything in Books Right
- Job costing by job, not by year
- 13-week cash flow forecast
- Four-number scorecard
- Monthly working call on the numbers
- Receivables chased and reported
Everything in Books Right, plus
- Job costing — labour, material, subs and overhead landed on each job, so you know the margin while you can still do something about it
- 13-week cash flow — rebuilt every month against real receivables and your draw schedule
- Four-number scorecard — cash, gross margin, receivables, backlog, on one page
- Monthly working call — 45 minutes on the numbers, not a status update
- Receivables — aging reviewed by customer, with a chase list you can hand to the office
Who this is for
Roughly $1M–$8M in revenue, more than one crew, and enough jobs running at once that you can't hold the margins in your head any more.
Most owners move up here when bookkeeping alone starts pushing $850/mo — at that point this tier costs less than the margin it finds.
Strategic CFO
$5,000/mo
Starting at
- Everything in CFO Core
- Annual budget and rolling forecast
- Pricing and bid strategy
- Lender and bonding packages
- Owner comp and distribution planning
- Quarterly board-style review
- In the room when it matters
Everything in CFO Core, plus a seat at the table
- Annual budget and rolling forecast — built with you, revised quarterly
- Pricing and bid strategy — what your work actually has to sell for
- Lender and bonding packages — assembled, formatted and defended in the meeting
- Owner comp and distributions — planned and coordinated with your tax preparer
- Quarterly review — the year against plan, with what changes next quarter
- In the room — bank, bonding agent, buyer, partner conversations
Who this is for
$5M and up, or any size business facing something structural — a bonding line, a partner buyout, an acquisition, a succession.
Priced from $5,000/mo because scope varies more here than anywhere else. The scoping call is free and produces a fixed number.
Why owners trust it
Standards you can hold us to.
By the 10th
Your books for last month are closed and in your hands by the tenth. Every month. If we miss it you hear from us first, with a reason.
14-point close
The same checklist runs every month and gets signed off. Nothing depends on somebody remembering.
4 numbers
A one-page scorecard — cash, margin, receivables, backlog. The four you'd want if you only had ten seconds.
One fixed price
Quoted in writing before we start. No hourly meter, no surprise line items, no charge for asking a question.
Who you're calling
You get me. Not a ticket number.
One person answers the phone, quotes the job, and closes your books. If something is wrong you tell me directly and I fix it — there is no account manager between us and no queue to sit in.
I keep the books for my own companies the same way I'd keep yours. That's not a sales line; it's the reason the checklist exists.
Built for your trade
Books that speak your trade.
Generic bookkeeping treats an HVAC company like a coffee shop. We build books around how your trade actually makes money — retainage, draw schedules, prime cost, whichever applies to you.
Case study
—
—
About these numbers: illustrative examples, not specific clients — they show the shape of the problem and how the work is done. Real engagements replace these as clients agree to be named.
Straight answers
Questions I get on every call.
How much does bookkeeping cost for a Texas contractor?
Monthly bookkeeping for a Texas contractor starts at $159/mo for a single entity with straightforward volume, and runs higher with more entities, heavier transaction volume, or job costing. Catch-up work is quoted separately as one fixed price.
The estimator at the top of this page gives you a real range in about fifteen seconds without asking for your email. If it lands near $850/mo on bookkeeping alone, CFO Core at $1,325 usually makes more sense — it includes job costing and forecasting, and we'll say so rather than let you overpay for the cheaper tier.
I'm three years behind. Is that too far gone?
No. Three years behind is normal for the businesses we take on, and it is fixable for one fixed quote — usually in four to eight weeks depending on how many entities and how much volume.
You will not get a lecture and you will not get an hourly meter. We tell you the number before we start, we work backwards from the most recent year so you get something usable fastest, and your tax preparer gets clean files at the end of it.
Do I have to switch software?
No. We work in whatever you already use — QuickBooks Online, Desktop, Xero, or a shoebox and a bank login.
If moving would genuinely save you money we'll say so and price the move separately. We don't get paid to migrate you.
Where in Texas do you work?
Lone Star CFO is based in Waco, Texas and works with contractors and service businesses statewide — in person across Central Texas, Dallas–Fort Worth, Weatherford and Houston, and remote everywhere else in Texas.
Remote-first is the default. When the stakes justify the drive — a bonding meeting, a lender sit-down — we show up.
Areas we serve
Get your number
Rather have it in writing?
Three fields. I send the range you just built, plus what it would take to catch you up — and then it's your move.
- 01You send three fields
Name, one way to reach you, and your trade. Nothing else — I already have the numbers from the estimator.
- 02I reply the same business day
Usually within a couple of hours. A written range for monthly and for catch-up, with the assumptions spelled out.
- 03You decide whether to call
If the number works, we scope it on a 15-minute call and you get one fixed price in writing. If it doesn't, you've lost nothing.
No listYou're not subscribed to anything
No sequenceOne reply from a person, not a funnel
No obligationA number is not a commitment