The doubled fee
CPA Round Rock Alternative and the fee that doubles
The morning a crew is already on the lot and the permit is still in the truck is the morning the fee doubles. The books need that amount on the job, in the month the bank paid it.
Read the fee
What that morning means for the books
The city is clear. Start the work before the permit is issued and the fee doubles. Owners tell it as a story about weather or about a crew that drove in from a finished job and did not want to sit. The books do not need the story first. They need the fee on the job that was open that morning, in the month the bank paid it.
Two other clocks get mixed up with that one. A certificate of occupancy, once the inspections are actually done, often takes three to five business days. A permit that nobody starts can go void if work does not begin within six months. One clock punishes an early start. The other punishes a start that never comes. We write both next to the fee so a close does not treat a dead permit as a live cost, or a live doubled fee as a mystery withdrawal.
Smaller charges sit nearby and should not be thrown into the same line. A tenant change is 35 dollars. A reinspection is 75 dollars. A site plan starts at 2,000 dollars for the first acre and adds 200 dollars for each acre after that. None of those is the doubled fee. Each of them has a name. A month that names them can be explained to a partner without a scavenger hunt.
A figure on a drawing needs a name or it is just a shape, and a fee needs a job or it is just a withdrawal. The morning the crew rolled early is the morning the bank line will not explain itself. We do not claim a bench at the lot. What we take from that morning is ordinary. Someone has to say which job was open, and the close is where that name gets written before the next bid goes out.
On the bookkeeping side the path is dull on purpose. The bank feed lands. We accept the matches that are truly the same transaction. The doubled fee rarely matches by itself, because the permit vendor and the job name are not the same words. Someone has to say which job. That someone can be you, in one line, on a video call. Then the reconciliation can finish and the month can lock.
Payroll setup belongs in the same week if the crew is new. We connect the provider, we set the accounts, and we watch the first run land in the right pots. The provider pays the people. We do not. A doubled permit fee is not wages, and it should not be hiding in a payroll clearing account because that was the only open bucket on a Friday.
If the fee was paid in March and the books still show March open in June, we do not build a return on top of that. We close March, or we say we will not take the later months. A pretty forecast on an open quarter is how a doubled fee gets forgotten until the notice arrives.
The useful end of this page is a question you can answer without us. Which job was the crew on when the permit was still unsigned? If you know that, the fee has a home. If you do not, the first call is about finding it, not about a yearly plan.
The doubled amount is still a cost of that morning, and the job name is what makes the cost readable to a partner who was not on the lot. Bring the morning. We will ask for the job before we ask for anything else.
A reconciliation that stops at the bank balance is only half done. The other half is the job list. We print the open jobs with their permit status beside them, even when the status is simply unknown. Unknown is a useful word. It keeps a partner from believing a lot is permitted because the crew photo looks busy. The photo is not a permit. The fee on the statement is not a permit either. The permit is a document with a date, and that date is what decides whether the fee was the single rate or the doubled one.
Owners sometimes want the doubled amount buried so a customer never sees it on a draw. Burying it does not shrink it. It moves the argument from the job meeting into the year end meeting, where nobody remembers which morning was wet. We would rather the draw show a line the customer can ask about while the trench is still open. You can choose the words on that line. The amount should not be the surprise.
Keep going from the fee
Tell us which job
One sentence on the job is enough to start.
You will be talking to the Steven Palmieri practice.