Seattle
Bookkeeping services in Seattle
Outsourced bookkeeping for Seattle companies, where the state taxes gross receipts instead of income and the city taxes large payrolls.
Outsourced bookkeeping for Seattle companies, where the state taxes gross receipts instead of income and the city taxes large payrolls.
At a glance
Washington has no corporate or personal income tax, which reads like a simplification and is not one. The state charges a Business and Occupation tax instead, and it is assessed on gross receipts with no deduction for what it cost you to earn them.
This is the distinction that catches people. An income tax on a loss is zero. A gross receipts tax on a loss is not zero. A Seattle company burning venture money to grow revenue owes B&O on that revenue regardless of the loss underneath it.
B&O is also charged at different rates by activity classification, so a company doing more than one thing — services and software, say — has to split revenue by classification rather than reporting one number.
Seattle's payroll expense tax applies only to large employers. For 2025 it applied to businesses with a prior-year Seattle payroll of roughly $8.8 million and at least one employee above a high compensation threshold. Thresholds are indexed annually.
Most seed and Series A companies are nowhere near this. It matters because it is a real cliff: a company that grows into the threshold acquires a new tax and a new filing in the same year it is celebrating the growth that caused it.
Daily categorisation, revenue split by B&O classification rather than lumped, a monthly close with a named accountant, and burn and runway kept current. Delaware C-corps get the franchise tax handled alongside.
Where these numbers come from