The partner did not ask you to buy software. The partner asked whose number is the year.
A desktop company file, a binder of repair orders, or a spreadsheet with a tab per month can all be the real books. Alma's rate is not the mystery. The mystery is which of those piles the partner is supposed to trust, and whether sales tax was a line or a guess.
Alma sits in Ellis County. The combined rate on the Comptroller file is 8.25%. City tax is 2%. Transit is not on the line. A special-purpose district is not on the line. State 6.25% and city 2% are the entire 8.25%. The rendition of business personal property goes to Ellis Appraisal District, due April 15. That is the district's full name to use on the form, not a generic 'county office.' Its instructions govern the date of the list. May 15 is the franchise (margin) tax report. You might fall under the no-tax-due threshold. Confirm that from the Comptroller, not from a figure remembered in the shop. Personal income is not taxed by Texas. The sales-tax permit still carries its own cadence: monthly, quarterly, or yearly, chosen by volume. A shop whose repair orders already split parts from labor, and whose software never did, fits the auto-repair cleanup site. The fit is the repair order, not a guess about Alma. Guides for other work are gathered on the industries page.
The partner's question was simple and the file is not. One of you has been running the shop from a program that was installed years ago. Now there are two years, and they overlap. Alma's combined rate is 8.25%, city tax 2%, state 6.25%, and no transit. A repair order is already a better chart of accounts than most imported files. It shows parts, labor, a core charge, maybe a sublet invoice from another shop. The old software often dumped all of that into one sales account and one tax checkbox. The partner does not need every oil change recoded tonight. Do not 'fix' this by deleting the old file. The old file is the history. Sales tax returns are the bridge. Each return says what you told the Comptroller. The tickets underneath either support that number or they do not. That comparison is the work. A fresh start that ignores the returns is how the same tax gets paid twice, or not at all. Ellis Appraisal District still wants a rendition on April 15 for property the business owns. Lifts, scanners, and the compressor are easy to forget because they never appear on a repair order. They also never appear in a file that only imported bank transactions. The partner will ask about them the moment a lender does. Send a backup or an export of the legacy file, a read-only invite or an export of the new one, the sales-tax returns for the overlap months, and three repair orders that show parts and labor. The first pass does not merge the two files into a novel. It picks the cutoff, ties the returns to the tickets in those months, and writes down whether the rate in the software matches Alma's 8.25% with a 2% city tax. You get the cutoff date, a list of tax periods that do not match the tickets, and a note of shop equipment that is in neither file. That packet is what you hand the partner, and it comes back before the meeting you already promised, not after the argument. You can send the ugly export. Pretty is not a requirement. No Alma address is involved. The files travel.
Parts, labor, and core charges are the subject of the auto-repair guide.
Auto repair shop books cleanup
If the legacy file is a different trade, the industry list is the honest door.
Book a time and send both files before the partner meeting.