Fractional CFO NowThe month still comes first here

Fair Park, and the walls we both see

Fair Park before the gates fill is a quiet lawn and a long row of halls. When Fair Park is open, we enjoy the 1936 buildings with everyone else. You see plaster and color. We see the same walls and wonder what life is left on the books. The State Fair of Texas has returned to Fair Park for a run of weeks almost every year since the late nineteenth century, aside from the war years and one recent year it did not open. We enjoy that return with everyone else. The grounds only make sense once you know which building is actually in use. A monthly quote is the same kind of knowledge.

The fountain and the Music Hall sit on those same grounds. A fair week can fill the calendar and still leave the bank unmatched on Monday. The thirteen weeks do not take that week off.

The lake, the front, and the doors

The boardwalk at White Rock Lake is a Saturday a lot of Texans know. We like that water. A loud Saturday still has to reconcile. A fast cold front can turn the sky over downtown a hard blue. We feel that front. The cash view still rolls the week it hits. Bishop Arts is shops in north Oak Cliff, each door with its own name. We like that block. A deposit that lumps every door into one line is what a close is for.

If you are in the neighborhood, these are places we share with you. The fairgrounds, the lake, the sky when a front arrives, the doors in north Oak Cliff. The week was real. The bank still has to match it. A Saturday at the lake, a cold front, a game that fills the fairgrounds, none of those pause the bank.

The arch, the lawn, and the ball

The Margaret Hunt Hill Bridge carries a freeway across the Trinity in a single arch, and a Texas flag is often in the same view. We like that arch. It does one job and then the road is on the other side. A month of this work is the same shape. Klyde Warren Park is a deck of lawn over Woodall Rodgers, open early and late, with the freeway underneath still moving. We like that lawn. It does not pretend the freeway is gone. Part time work is a deck in that spirit. The daily traffic stays with the people who already touch it.

Reunion Tower is the ball people point at on the skyline, in the district named for an old colony. We like that ball. Visitors remember the sphere. The shaft is what you climb. The first ninety days are the shaft. People will still point at the clean month. The climb is the part that looks like work.

The game, the brick, the glass, the herd, the street

The Texas and Oklahoma game is played at the Cotton Bowl during the fair, usually on a Saturday in October, with the grounds already full of the fair's long run. We like that Saturday. The city leans toward Fair Park and the week is loud. Thirteen weeks from a week like that still lands before the year turns. You can see the tax deposit, the rent, the payroll Fridays, and the invoices that always slip, without pretending you know next summer.

The West End is the old warehouse district on the northwest side of downtown, brick buildings that used to hold goods before they held restaurants and offices. We like that brick. A warehouse is only useful when you can say what is inside and the doors are not still swinging. A closed month is that sentence for the books.

The chapel at Thanks-Giving Square holds a spiral of glass overhead, the Glory Window, a quiet room in a loud part of town. We like that quiet. It is not a picture of a tax form. The tax story is plainer. The comptroller's city table lists the sales tax in Dallas as 8.25 percent, a state share of 6.25 percent, a city share of 1 percent, and a transit share of 1 percent. Money that includes those shares is not all yours. We set the shares aside in the month of the sale, in a place the operating account cannot casually spend.

Oak Cliff was its own town from the late nineteenth century until it was annexed in the early twentieth, which is why people there still talk about it as its own place. We like that stubborn line. The bronze cattle at Pioneer Plaza are a public herd on a trail that is history, not a driveway we claim. Owner pay needs a line with the same kind of stubbornness. Deep Ellum is the old warehouse street people still seek out for live music, a noise that goes back a long way in the city's own telling. We like that noise. The controller week is still paper. The street can stay a street.

The rest of the state

An owner in Tyler or Midland takes the same monthly close on a camera, with the books on the screen. Tyler and Midland are not places this practice keeps an office. The close does not care which side of the state the bank login comes from. It cares that the month ends and the cash is named. The owner in Tyler and the practice in Dallas share one state and one close date, and the camera is the hallway between them. Tyler is not a neighborhood this practice claims. The month travels anyway. The close does not move.

Bring the month that embarrasses you. A fuzzy date is still a start. The photograph on this page is the Fair Park esplanade by Andreas Praefcke, 2009, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 3.0. It is the one place photograph. The national pages do not carry it.

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