Texas franchise tax, sales tax, mixed beverage taxes, TWC — what your books owe each one.

Per the Comptroller, franchise tax is a privilege tax on entities formed in or doing business in Texas, calculated on a "taxable margin" rather than on net income directly — which is where its nickname, the margin tax, comes from. For reports filed in 2026, the no-tax-due threshold is $2,650,000 of annualized total revenue, and the old No Tax Due Report itself is discontinued: an entity at or under that line instead files a Public Information Report or Ownership Information Report. The annual report is due May 15 (the next business day if that falls on a weekend or holiday). Entities above the threshold owe tax at 0.375% of margin for retail and wholesale businesses or 0.75% for other entity types, and an E-Z Computation option exists for entities with $20 million or less in annualized total revenue — which method actually applies, and the resulting rate, is a computation your CPA runs. (Comptroller, verified September 2026.)

What the books need to hold, regardless of which side of the threshold a business lands on: a single, provable total-revenue figure for the legal entity — not blended across multiple DBAs or commingled bank accounts, and not sitting in a clearing or owner-loan account where it can't be counted. If the first year is a short period, the days-in-period detail needs to be there too, since the threshold test annualizes a partial year rather than using it raw — the mechanics are worked through with real numbers in our franchise-threshold post. For a business whose revenue arrives through a card processor or online platform, remember that a 1099-K is a separate federal form with its own recently changed threshold — it was never a substitute for the ledger's own reconciled revenue total, and the franchise-tax question doesn't wait for one to arrive. Expense and vendor records should also be split cleanly enough that a CPA can test the cost-of-goods-sold and compensation deduction paths without re-categorizing a year of transactions first, and a multi-state business needs Texas-sourced receipts tracked apart from receipts everywhere, so apportionment is a lookup rather than a reconstruction.

Filing the report — and choosing how to compute the margin above the threshold — is your CPA's job; the books' job is a revenue number nobody has to re-derive.

Per TABC, a Mixed Beverage Permit is what authorizes a business to sell distilled spirits, wine, and malt beverages for on-premises consumption — and holding that permit is what pulls a business into the mixed beverage tax rules instead of ordinary sales tax. Two separate Comptroller-administered taxes then apply to that alcohol: a 6.7% gross receipts tax that the permit holder itself owes and can't add to a customer's bill as a separate charge (though it may disclose the amount), and an 8.25% mixed beverage sales tax — a flat statewide rate with no city or county add-on — that the permittee collects from the customer and remits. Both returns are monthly, each due the 20th of the following month. (TABC and Comptroller, verified September 2026.)

For the books, the point-of-sale system needs to separate alcohol — plus the ice and mixers served with it — from food and merchandise at the register, because the two streams answer to different tax rules entirely. The 6.7% gross receipts tax behaves like an operating cost against that month's alcohol receipts, so it belongs in an expense account tied to the period it was earned in, not netted against sales. The 8.25% collected from customers belongs in a liability account from the moment the drink is rung up, never in revenue. And because both mixed-beverage returns are monthly rather than quarterly, the internal close on the alcohol side needs to land early enough in the following month to support a filing due the 20th — a tighter rhythm than some businesses are used to running. The full method, including the point-of-sale discipline and a side-by-side of the two taxes, lives in our mixed beverage taxes glossary entry and our bar bookkeeping guide — worth reading in full rather than repeated here.

Which permit a business needs, and the returns themselves, are calls for TABC, the Comptroller, and your CPA — the books' job is keeping the two tax lines provable and separate from food and retail sales.