What a CPA Costs for a Small Business in Southlake, and What You Get
What a CPA Costs for a Small Business in Southlake, and What You Get
Ranges reviewed September 2026. I update them once a year.
Most of the owners who call my office have already looked for this number and not found it. They have three quotes that are not comparable, a bookkeeper who charges by the hour, and a nagging sense that they are either overpaying or about to get a bill they did not plan for. So here is the market, in plain language, with the ranges other Dallas-Fort Worth firms publish and what you should expect to receive at each level.
These are market ranges, not my fee schedule. My fees depend on your books, your entity, and what you need, and I quote them after a first conversation. What this article gives you is a way to read any quote, including mine.
The three things you are actually buying
A CPA relationship for a small business usually breaks into three services, and the biggest cause of confusion is treating them as one price.
Monthly bookkeeping is the ongoing work: categorizing transactions, reconciling bank and credit card accounts, and producing financial statements you can read. Annual tax preparation is the return itself, the 1120-S, 1065, or Schedule C, plus your Texas franchise report. Advisory is the planning work that happens between those two, the part that changes what you owe rather than reporting it.
Firms bundle these differently. Ask which of the three a quote covers before you compare it to anything.
Monthly bookkeeping: what the DFW market charges
Published ranges in our area run from about $300 to $600 per month for a standard small business package, and up to $1,500 per month for higher volume or more complex books. One Southlake firm lists $300 to $600 for bookkeeping that includes bank reconciliation, payroll processing, and monthly financial statements. A Fort Worth firm publishes $300 to $1,500 per month for bookkeeping alone, and $500 to $2,500 per month for a full-service monthly retainer that folds in tax and planning.
What moves you from the low end to the high end: transaction volume, the number of accounts and cards, payroll, sales tax filings, inventory, and whether your books are current when you arrive. Cleanup of past months is usually priced separately. If you are handed a single low monthly number, ask what is excluded.
What you should get at any price: reconciled accounts every month, a profit and loss statement and balance sheet you receive without asking, and a person who answers when a number looks wrong.
Annual tax preparation: what the DFW market charges
For a business return, the published local ranges are wide because the returns are. A Southlake firm lists $1,000 to $2,000 for an S corporation or partnership return, including the state filing and K-1s. A Fort Worth firm published $800 to $1,200 for small LLCs and S corporations and $1,500 to $3,000 and up for larger businesses. Another Fort Worth CPA lists $2,000 to $5,000 for an S corporation or partnership return and $1,500 to $3,500 for a single-member LLC filing on Schedule C.
For context, the most recent national survey of tax preparer fees put the average S corporation return at about $1,100 and the average partnership return at about $940, and that survey is several years old, so local numbers running above it is expected.
The Texas franchise tax report is often a separate line, $250 to $500 in the published Southlake range.
What moves the price: how many K-1s, depreciation schedules, multi-state activity, and the state of your books. A return prepared from clean, reconciled books costs less than one where the preparer has to rebuild the year first, and that difference is the most common reason two quotes for the same business are a thousand dollars apart.
What you should get: the return, the state filing, e-filing, and a review of what the return tells you before you sign it. A return that arrives with no conversation attached is bookkeeping's cousin, not advice.
Advisory: where the fee structure changes
This is the service most owners have never bought, and it is the one that changes a tax bill. Advisory is the planning conversation in October instead of the surprise in April: entity structure, owner compensation, retirement plan contributions like the SEP IRA and Solo 401(k) I wrote about last month, timing of purchases, and estimated payments that are neither a penalty nor an interest-free loan to the IRS.
Published rates in Dallas-Fort Worth for CPA advisory time run from about $150 to $400 per hour depending on the experience of the person you are talking to. Ongoing arrangements are usually a monthly retainer instead, and the Fort Worth range I cited above, $500 to $2,500 per month, is the typical shape for a business under a few million in revenue. Fractional CFO work, which I also offer, is scoped and priced separately because it depends on how much of the finance function you are handing over; published Dallas ranges for companies past a few million in revenue sit well above the retainer range here.
What you should get: a plan before year-end, in writing, with the dollar effect of each decision, and a check-in when something in the business changes. If you are paying for advisory and only hearing from your CPA at filing time, you are paying for tax preparation with a nicer name.
How to compare quotes
Put the three services in three columns. Write each quote's number under the column it covers, and mark what is excluded. Then ask each firm the same four questions: who does the monthly work and who reviews it, what happens if my books are behind when we start, is the Texas franchise report included, and when do we talk about planning. The answers separate firms faster than the prices do.
One more thing to check. If you are a Spanish-speaking owner, or your bookkeeper or partner is, ask whether the firm works in Spanish. Atendemos en español, and I mention it because it is rarely on a pricing page and it matters every week.
Where the ranges come from
The figures above are published on the websites of firms in Southlake and Fort Worth and in a national fee survey, as of September 2026. They are market ranges, not a promise of what any firm will charge you, and not my fees. I will review and update this page once a year.
If you want to know where your business lands and what you would actually receive, book an initial consultation at kdiazcpa.com. Bring last year's return and three months of bank statements, and I will tell you what I see.
Karolyn Diaz, CPA Karolyn Diaz CPA, Southlake, Texas
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