Real Estate QuickBooks CleanupFor Texas owners.

Neighbors in Dallas and Fort Worth.

The practice is in Dallas. We work with owners in Dallas from this same city, and we enjoy the place the way a neighbor does. Big Tex has stood in Fair Park since 1952. We enjoy that howdy, then we split the deposit into the fee, the agent share, and the earnest money. The lighted ball over the Reunion district is named for the old La Reunion colony. A net deposit hides the parts the way that ball hides the ground under it. One shape in the sky. Several amounts in the wire. The close can land on the same day each month whether the property is in Oak Cliff or the statement is opened from a kitchen table. We do not keep a second storefront for showings.

Fort Worth is the same metro, and we do not claim a second office on the north side. Cowtown Coliseum in the Stockyards was built in 1908 as the Grand Coliseum, the first indoor rodeo arena in the country, and it still holds weekly rodeos. We are not in that arena. A deposit should be that kind of separate room. The show can be loud in the operating account. The hold stays next door until the lease is done. The Fort Worth Water Gardens have channeled water since 1974. A security deposit needs that same side channel, away from rent already earned.

The Red River game lands at the Cotton Bowl in Fair Park, usually the second Saturday of October and right in the middle of the fair, and it has done that since 1934. We share that Saturday with you from the same city. Then we ask which part of the loud number was a fee, because the scoreboard is one figure and the deposit is still four jobs. A bedroom window on an ordinary Texas afternoon is easy to picture. We do not claim the room. Until a written scope names the cleanup, the message on this form is only a message.

We are all Texans, and the office stays in Dallas.

Houston, Austin, and San Antonio are outside Dallas and Fort Worth. We are all Texans. We do not claim to live there, to have visited, or to keep an office there. Owners in those cities join by video. The books are shared, the call is on a calendar, and the close day does not move because the property is on the other side of the state.

Buffalo Bayou Park runs from Shepherd to Sabine. We are not on that trail, and a week there is not a year's lease. Port Houston moves freight on the Ship Channel and calls itself the nation's largest port by tonnage. We have no office on that channel. We do recognize a lump that hides several jobs. A payout that bundles three weekends and a cleaning fee is that kind of lump. The tonnage is not the lesson. The unpacking is. Houston also reaches into Fort Bend and Montgomery counties, so the address decides which county's appraisal notice belongs with the door.

The Congress Avenue Bridge was renamed for Ann Richards in 2006, and the bats still leave at dusk. We have not stood under that flight. Land in a purchase still has to leave the building. Andrew Jackson Zilker gave Austin its big park in 1917, the ground where Barton Creek meets the Colorado. That lawn is not a place we claim to have visited. One gift can hold a lot of uses, and a purchase price is that kind of gift to the file. Until the price is split, every use stays blurred. There is no office in Austin. The books are shared and the hour sits on the calendar, and that is the whole bridge.

Fiesta San Antonio has been the city's April festival since 1891, also called the Battle of Flowers. We are not on the river that week. We do know what a full hotel week does to a payout. A platform check that arrives because the city is packed can be a short stay, hotel tax and all, or it can be a lease that happened to renew in April. The festival does not decide. The nights do. Arneson River Theater opened along the River Walk between 1939 and 1941, with the audience on one bank and the stage on the other. We are not in that audience. A rent check and a fee you earned should be that separated. No room on the River Walk is ours. San Antonio work is a video call from the Dallas practice, and the close day is the day the scope names.

Trust money and the second working day.

In Texas, earnest money, rent, security deposits, and other cash held for someone else are trust money. The broker holds it in an account identified as a trust account, or delivers it to an escrow agent the parties agreed to use. A sales agent does not keep that account. Money the agent receives goes to the sponsoring broker. Unless the parties agreed in writing to a different time, the broker deposits it or delivers it by the close of business on the second working day after receiving it.

If the trust account had activity, the broker provides a monthly accounting of that money. The records are kept for four years from the day the document was received or created. When a contract dies, the cash stays trust money until the release the rule allows is signed. Paying ordinary bills from the trust account is the pattern the rule treats as commingling. None of that is a click-path in the software. It is the reason the operating bank and the trust bank are not the same story.

We do not hold the earnest money for you, and we do not pretend a web page is the brokerage's trust ledger. We set the file so the ledger you already keep can be seen beside the bank. An open contract is not a fee. The cash stays matched to an amount you still owe. A cleanup that throws away the old trust folder to make the screen tidy is not a cleanup.

Hotel tax on a short stay.

State hotel tax is 6 percent of the cost of a room. The state tax applies when a room costs 15 dollars or more a day. For that tax, a hotel includes a house, a condo, or an apartment the public rents for less than thirty consecutive days. A stay of thirty or more consecutive days can be a permanent-resident stay and fall out of the tax, with the written notice rules the Comptroller's page describes. We do not recite the notice form here. We keep the nights in the file so the question can be answered.

Local hotel taxes apply to sleeping rooms costing 2 dollars or more a day, and they are a separate call to the city or the county even when a platform already sent the state tax. The Comptroller's hotel page names Tax Code chapter 156 for the state tax, chapter 351 for a city, and chapter 352 for a county. Hotel reports for the month have to be filed by the 20th. Only the person required to file the report may take the 1 percent timely-filing discount. A platform that has agreed to collect the state hotel tax must collect it and send it. If you rent on your own site, or on a platform that does not collect, you collect and you send.

We put those lines where a later return can find them. We do not guess a savings number from a web page, and we do not guess a city rate without looking it up for that property when the work starts. A stale rate would be worse than a blank. The Comptroller's page wins when a label in the file and that page disagree.

The margin tax on brokerage income.

Texas franchise tax is the margin tax owners mean when a brokerage asks what the state wants from the year. The Comptroller's table for 2026 and 2027 lists a no-tax-due threshold of 2,650,000 dollars of annualized total revenue. At or under that line, no tax is due. The table's retail and wholesale rate, which brokerage income does not use, is 0.375 percent. Other businesses, and a brokerage is in that other group rather than in retail or wholesale, are taxed at 0.75 percent. Compensation you deduct on that Comptroller table cannot pass 480,000 dollars. Revenue that stays at or under 20 million dollars may use the shorter EZ computation, and the rate on that shorter computation is 0.331 percent. Circle May 15 as the filing day for the margin report that goes with this tax. File the year with the rate the Comptroller published for that year, not a rate remembered from the year before.

A single-member limited liability company can be disregarded on the federal return and still be a taxable entity for this report. The same May packet carries the public information report, or the owner information report if that is the one this entity uses. We do not invent a penalty. The Comptroller publishes the rate, the threshold, and the due date, and those publications win when a note in the file disagrees with them. No city franchise tax appears on that page.

The margin on brokerage income is also a decision, not only a rate. After the deposit splits, the Tax CFO question is what the year should carry. Which doors you keep. Which loan you refinance. What is left once holds, agent shares, and earnest money are out of the profit. The 0.75 percent is the state slice of that margin. It is not a reason to call the whole wire income.

Five counties, five appraisal districts.

A value notice is not the same piece of paper in every county. Brokerage income is a different number. In Harris County the appraisal office is the Harris Central Appraisal District, and an owner can file the business rendition on that office's site. Dallas Central Appraisal District is the district for Dallas County. The Travis Central Appraisal District appraises the Travis County part of the Austin area, and it says the rendition deadline is April 15. The Tarrant Appraisal District, not the city of Fort Worth and not the county, sets the values every taxing unit in Tarrant County uses, and it has done that since it was created on January 1, 1980. Business personal property renditions there are due April 15, and an extension needs a written request by that same date. The Bexar County appraisal district, at bcad.org, is the district for San Antonio's county.

Those are different offices. A door in Harris County does not get its notice from Dallas, and a door in the Fort Bend or Montgomery part of the Houston area does not get its notice from Harris Central. We keep each notice with the door it names. We do not invent a rate spread between the counties, and we do not print a street or a phone for those offices here. The protest calendar is theirs. The federal estimates on 15 April, 15 June, 15 September, and 15 January are a different calendar, and they are not moved by a value notice.

Land still is not written off. A residential building is still written off on a straight line over 27.5 years. The appraisal district's number is not the contract price. The split between land and building comes from the worksheet you already have, or it stays unsplit until you do. If you do not have that worksheet, we say so instead of guessing from the notice.

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