Business, Contracting and Public Money Across Dallas Fort Worth and North Texas

North Texas Business ReviewSOUTHWESTPROCUREMENT REVIEW

Independent business publication

Doing business in Dallas, Fort Worth and North Texas

Most readers arrive from a city or county page that answered one question and left four others open. This publication covers the ground around it: forming a company, registering it for tax, getting a space approved before it opens, taking on staff, negotiating a local incentive, and selling to a public buyer. Each section below answers a different question, and no section has to be read before another.

The sections, and what each one answers

Six of them, set side by side rather than in a run, because a metroplex business meets them in whatever order its own year imposes. Each names the office that settles a question instead of answering on that office's behalf.

  • Starting a businessWhat the state needs before it will recognize a company, what a county clerk still records, and what a city has to sign off before a door opens.
  • WorkforceThe point at which paying a wage turns an owner into a registered employer, what follows every hire after that, and which North Texas board covers which county.
  • IncentivesWhat a city can offer under Chapter 380 and a county under Chapter 381, who has to vote on it, and where an executed agreement becomes public.
  • ProcurementHow public and corporate buyers reach a decision before any notice appears, and the ordered run of gates a supplier moves through to meet them.
  • CertificationWhich certificate a given buyer will accept, which body issues it, what it is worth in practice, and which state route closed this year.
  • Business resourcesThe institutions that answer these questions first hand, each one paired with the single thing it will refuse to do.

Which office actually decides

Nothing about running a business here is administered from one desk. A company is formed at the Texas Secretary of State and registered for tax with the Comptroller of Public Accounts, both of them in Austin and neither of them interested in the address the business will occupy. Whether it may open at that address is settled by the city that zoned it. Whether an owner has become an employer is settled by the Texas Workforce Commission, on a test about wages paid rather than about headcount. Whether a county clerk needs a filing at all turns on how the business is structured. Four authorities, no one of which will answer for the others, and no one of which will mention that a fifth is waiting.

The city layer is where a metroplex-wide answer stops existing. Dallas, Fort Worth and Arlington each run their own permitting portal on their own fee schedule, and the requirement shifts again with land use, with zoning district, and with whether an existing space is being altered rather than occupied as it stands. This publication reports where each city publishes its own rules and declines to average them into a single rule that would be wrong in most cases. The same restraint runs through everything else here. Where a figure could not be read on the authority's own page, the page names the office and stops.

Public buyers are the one group on this list a business can approach rather than merely comply with. Agencies, cities, school districts and airports advertise what they need in the open and on fixed schedules, and the systems carrying those notices are indexed under the places a solicitation actually appears. Whether a firm meets a particular buyer's definition of a small business is a separate question with its own arithmetic, worked through under how a buyer measures size.

A calendar, not a ladder

The board above carries no numbers, and that is the honest shape. A little of what it points at happens once. A certificate of formation is filed a single time, and changing it afterward is its own separate filing on its own separate fee line. Almost everything else is a calendar. The annual franchise tax report falls due on May 15, and it falls due whether or not anything is owed, because an entity at or below the no tax due threshold still has to file an information report. An employer registers with the Workforce Commission within ten days of paying the wage that made it liable, then reports and pays every quarter for as long as it keeps staff. A new hire is reported within 20 days of the effective hire date, every time there is one.

Incentives run on a different clock again. A local agreement is negotiated with a city or a county rather than applied for from the state, and once it is signed the local government has to report it to the Comptroller, where it lands in a database anyone can search. A business that has never bid for public work may still be sitting inside one of those agreements. A business that bids constantly may never touch one.

Order matters inside a section and rarely between them. A firm can be hiring long before it looks at a public bid, or bidding for years before it asks a city for anything at all. One section here is genuinely sequential: a supplier cannot enter a bidders list as a certified firm before some body has certified it, so the numbered board setting out that order now sits on the page for the section it describes, where it says something true about its own subject instead of dressing the front page in an order the rest of the site does not have.

What this site is not

North Texas Business Review is a publication and nothing else: not a chamber of commerce, not a government agency, and not a body that issues, reviews or revokes any certificate named on this site. It sells nothing to readers, takes no payment from any organization it writes about, and has no stake in which route a supplier picks. Where a rule belongs to the Comptroller of Public Accounts, to a federal agency or to a private council, this site says so and links to that body, because the answer that counts comes from the office that makes the decision and never from a publisher.

What it does have is a rule about sourcing. Every figure, deadline and eligibility test published here is taken from the body that sets it and dated to the day it was read, and where something could not be confirmed the page says so rather than rounding the gap into a sentence that sounds finished.

Sources

  1. Texas Secretary of State, Business Filings and Trademarks Fee Schedule, Form 806Consulted 25 August 2026
  2. Texas Comptroller of Public Accounts, franchise taxConsulted 25 August 2026
  3. Texas Comptroller of Public Accounts, franchise tax filing requirementsConsulted 25 August 2026
  4. Texas Workforce Commission, determine whether you need to establish a tax accountConsulted 25 August 2026
  5. Texas Workforce Commission, responsibilities of a liable employerConsulted 25 August 2026
  6. Texas Comptroller of Public Accounts, Chapter 380 and 381 economic development agreementsConsulted 25 August 2026