Dispatchly's franchise tax comes back $0 owed. The report is still due May 15 — and its own December 15 deadline sits a full month ahead of the date an individual return would show for the same quarter

The moment

Dispatchly is twenty-six months old: the same Austin, Texas shop from Naomi Reyes and Ethan Cho's earlier chapters, now running real biweekly payroll for six people — the two founders, two engineers, and the two sales hires the March equity extension paid for. The growth those hires were brought in to chase hadn't shown up in the numbers yet; they'd only started in April. The company was still the thirty customers it had been at the seed extension, each paying roughly $600 a month — about $216,000 a year, annualized.

It is the fourth week of September. Dispatchly has never run a full federal-and-state obligation calendar as what it actually is now — a Delaware C corporation with Texas payroll, a Texas sales-tax registration, and one outside contractor paid enough to need a 1099 — rather than as the two-founder side project it started as. The bookkeeper Naomi hired in the spring sat down to build the fall calendar the company had never had reason to need before.

What they did instead

Before this review, the obvious dates lived on a shared calendar: the payroll platform reminded the company about its own deposits, and everyone already knew April 15 meant something. The quieter dates were the ones that went missing. A franchise-tax report that comes back showing $0 owed reads, to someone in a hurry, as nothing to do at all — "no money due" and "no task" feel like the same thing, and they are not. And a founder who has filed her own personal return every April for years brings that rhythm into the company's obligations without checking whether a corporation's own calendar actually runs on the same months hers does.

The questions a CFO asks first

1. Across everything this business is actually on the hook for — federal and Texas both — what is the very next thing due, not just the big date everyone already has memorized?
2. This is a corporation now, not an owner's own return. Does its estimated-tax schedule run on the same four dates an individual's does, or a different one?
3. If the franchise tax report comes back $0 owed, is there still something due on May 15, or not?
4. Is every answer on this calendar an actual answer, or is a guess about to stand in for a question the business genuinely hasn't settled yet — like whether it owes Texas sales tax on a software subscription sold across state lines?

The arithmetic, shown

Three runs, all through the tool's own engine, all on Dispatchly's actual profile: a calendar-year C corporation, payroll running, one 1099-NEC contractor, Texas added as the state.

Scenario one — the fall calendar review, run whole. Every question answered, including the one Texas sales-tax question the CPA had already settled by then (see scenario two). The tool comes back with sixteen dated line items for the year, not a guess at which ones matter most: the payroll and contractor forms clustered on February 2, 2026; the corporate return on April 15, 2026, alongside the first of four corporate estimated-tax deposits; the third of those four deposits landing September 15, 2026; a Texas sales-tax return every quarter, including one landing October 20, 2026; and the corporation's own last estimated-tax deposit for the year on December 15, 2026. The tool's own note explains why that four-deposit schedule is worth checking at all rather than assumed: this is a C corporation, so it doesn't follow the individual quarterly estimated-tax schedule a pass-through owner would use — it has its own estimated-tax deposit schedule instead.

One line looks wrong at first glance: the Texas Franchise Tax Report, due May 15, 2026. Dispatchly's own annualized revenue — roughly thirty customers at about $600 a month, $216,000 a year — sits nowhere near the $2,650,000 threshold a business has to clear before any franchise tax is actually owed. The tool's own note says so directly: below that line, the franchise tax comes back $0 for report year 2026. But the report itself doesn't disappear along with the tax bill — because, as the calendar puts it, it's the missed filing, not the missed payment, that draws a penalty. A calendar built only around dollar amounts due would have dropped this line entirely.

Scenario two — the sales-tax question left open. Run in April, with the exact same profile except for one line the bookkeeper genuinely didn't have an answer to yet — whether a SaaS subscription sold to customers across state lines actually owes Texas sales tax — the tool doesn't guess either way. It returns a named refusal instead: missing: ["whether this business collects Texas sales tax"]. Nothing downstream of that question computes until it is actually answered by someone who knows, not assumed by the tool.

**Scenario three — a corporation's own December, not an owner's own January.** Even with everything answered, one line in scenario one's own calendar is easy to misread: the corporation's fourth and final estimated-tax deposit, Form 1120-W, is dated December 15, 2026. Naomi's own habit, built from years of filing her personal return every April, was to think of "Q4 estimated tax" as a January date — because for an individual paying tax on their own return, it is: the fourth individual estimated-tax payment for 2026 doesn't come due until January 15, 2027. Run the same tool with a pass-through profile instead of Dispatchly's actual C-corp one, and the fourth line reads exactly that — January 15, 2027. Same label, same quarter, same tool, a full month apart. The first three quarters land on identical dates either way — April 15, June 15, September 15 — which is exactly what makes the fourth one easy to assume follows the same pattern. It does not.

What changed

The CPA's answer came back in April: Dispatchly has enough Texas-sourced sales to register and file, so the open question became a settled "yes," filed quarterly — not a line still sitting blank on the calendar. The bookkeeper filed the $0 franchise tax report by May 15 anyway, rather than treating a zero balance as nothing to act on. And the internal reminder for the corporation's fourth estimated-tax deposit moved from mid-January, where Naomi's own habit had put it, to December 15 — the actual date on Dispatchly's own calendar, a full month earlier. None of the three changes cost the company anything close to real money this year. Missing any one of them would have cost a penalty, a late filing, or a payment made a month late against a deposit schedule nobody had checked closely enough to notice was different from the one Naomi already knew.

What the tool will not do

It will not decide whether Dispatchly's software is actually taxable under Texas sales-tax law. That determination — whether a specific SaaS product sold across state lines owes Texas sales tax — is exactly the kind of question this tool refuses to guess at; it takes the owner's own answer, yes or no, and computes the filing dates that follow from whichever answer is actually true, but it does not rule on Texas's own law for a specific product.

It will not cover Delaware, where Dispatchly is actually incorporated, the way it covers Texas, where the company actually operates. This tool supports a specific, named list of states — not all fifty, and the list is still growing — and a corporation's state of incorporation isn't one of the things it asks about at all. Check the tool itself for which states are currently covered before assuming yours is one of them; whatever Delaware requires of a company incorporated there sits on a separate calendar this tool doesn't touch.

It will not show the Texas sales-tax return covering the last quarter of 2026, due in January 2027. This run only checked the Comptroller's own 2026 due-date table, which doesn't reach that far — a named gap on the calendar, not a guessed date standing in for one.

It will not know about an extension already filed, an amended return, or a penalty already in motion on any of these dates. Every line here is the plain, unmodified due date; nothing about a specific filing's history changes what the tool shows.