What the read is looking for
Food processing, agriculture, manufacturing, aviation, logistics, energy, and bioscience are the sectors the city's development group names out loud. Texans can be proud of a list that long. A file from any one of those still gets the same first look. We are not grading the industry. We are grading the months.
The read comes before a price. It is a look at the months, rather than a tour. We open the QuickBooks file, find the last month that still matches the bank, and see what piled up after it. You get a plain account of that gap. A price, if we name one, is named after that look.
We look for transfers dressed up as sales, for checks that have been outstanding since last spring, for two companies living in one file, and for wage accounts that do not match the provider you run. We look for draws that disappeared into a single expense line. If the company is an S corporation, those draws have to be visible. We do not tell you how to be taxed. We tell you whether the books show what the owner took.
A user login is part of the read when you can give one. The user should see the month and should not be the login that pays the bills. If all you can offer today is an export, send that and say which month it stops at. We would rather start from a partial file than from a paragraph that guesses at revenue.
What we will not do in the read is invent a monthly fee to sound decisive. Scope follows the gap. A company that is one month behind is a different conversation from a company that has not closed a month since the year turned. Both can be helped. One month behind and a whole year behind are different jobs, with different fees and different calendars.
When the read is done, you can stop. There is no standing engagement hiding in the look. If you want the scoped month after that, we say what it includes and what it leaves with your provider. Payday stays with the provider. The close stays with us. The gap decides the scope.
