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Law firms
Client funds are not your money, and your books need to say so.
A trust account is the part of a firm’s books where nothing can be approximately right. Balances have to tie, by client, every month.
Trust accounting
Trust and operating, kept properly separate.
We maintain your trust account records alongside your operating books, reconcile them monthly, and keep client-level balances straight so nothing drifts. If something doesn’t tie, you hear about it that month, not at year end.
Working with your systems
We speak Clio, MyCase, TimeSolv, LawPay and Leap.
Billing lives in practice management, payments come through a processor, and the books live somewhere else again. Getting invoices, payments, trust deposits and disbursements to flow correctly between all three is where a lot of firm books quietly go wrong. We work in these systems and we don’t mind digging in when a sync stops behaving.
Service B&O
The service rate is tiered, and the tier is set by last year.
Legal and professional services fall under Service and Other Activities. Since October 2025 that rate steps up with size: 1.5% under $1 million, 1.75% from $1 million to $5 million, and 2.1% above that. Your rate for this year is set by last year’s taxable income, and affiliated entities count toward the same threshold. Crossing a tier without noticing is an expensive surprise.
Out-of-state clients
Apportionment can change what you owe, and sometimes the rate itself.
If your firm serves clients outside Washington, not all of that income necessarily belongs in your Washington B&O base. That matters twice over, because the tier threshold is measured on taxable income after apportionment. A firm billing over $1 million can still sit in the 1.5% tier once its out-of-state work is accounted for.
Whether it applies to your firm is the DOR’s call. Ours is to notice. If your client list suggests apportionment is in play, we say so, so it gets looked at instead of paying on everything by default.
City B&O
Cities tax you separately from the state.
Seattle, Bellevue, Tacoma, Everett and others levy their own B&O, each with its own registration, threshold and return. Thresholds move, sometimes substantially, so a firm that owed nothing one year can owe the next, or stop owing entirely without realizing it. We track where you’re working and file where you need to.
No sales tax on legal fees
Which is exactly why firms forget about the DOR.
Legal services aren’t a retail sale, so there’s no sales tax to collect and nothing that forces the question month to month. The return still has to be filed on schedule, under the right classification, at the right tier, with the payment coded correctly in your books.
Where the line sits
- We handle the bookkeeping and reconciliation side of your trust account. Meeting the bar’s trust accounting requirements is yours as the attorney, and we work alongside whatever the WSBA asks of you.
- Classification and apportionment questions go to the DOR. Their rules, guidance and rulings govern how your income is treated. We apply them, we tell you when something looks like it needs a ruling, and we don’t substitute our judgment for theirs.
- We don’t prepare tax returns. Your CPA keeps those, and we hand them a clean file.
Architects & engineers
Project billing, clean books, filings on time.
Design and engineering firms bill in phases, carry work in progress across months, and often have more than one line of revenue running at once. We keep the books current through all of it and make sure the DOR return reflects what the business actually did.
IT & technology
IT services became a retail sale in October 2025.
ESSB 5814 moved information technology services, custom website development, and custom software and customization work out of the service classification and into retail. That means retailing B&O plus collecting sales tax on invoices, for work that was never taxable before. The DOR has run penalty relief for the transition, new exclusions took effect July 2026, and parts of the law are being litigated.
Health practices
Therapists and chiropractors who’d rather not do books.
Most of our health practice clients want the same thing: someone reliable handling the bookkeeping and the state filing so they can see patients. The work is usually straightforward. We keep it that way, keep it current, and stay out of your clinical systems.
Owner and entity
- Business and personal spending run together, so nothing reconciles cleanly
- Owner draws taken without proper distributions recorded
- After an S-corp election, no reasonable salary running through payroll and owner health insurance reported incorrectly
Washington tax
- Everything filed under one B&O classification when the business actually has more than one line of work
- Sales tax never considered because the business assumed services aren’t taxable
- City B&O never registered for, in cities where the business clearly works
Records and filings
- Accounts not reconciled, so the numbers were never trustworthy to begin with
- Contractors paid with no W-9 collected up front and no 1099s filed at year end
- DOR returns unfiled, with penalties and interest still accruing
What you actually get
What a month looks like.
The same rhythm every month, so you always know where things stand.
We work the file
Transactions categorized, accounts reconciled, and for firms, trust balances tied out by client. If something doesn’t look right, you hear from us then.
Filings prepared and submitted
Your DOR return prepared, filed and paid on schedule under the right classifications, plus any city B&O you owe, coded correctly in your books.
You get a closed month
Financials your CPA can use without rebuilding them, and a bookkeeper who can tell you why anything on them looks the way it does.
“I run a law practice and they have done an awesome job of managing my books and trust account, which is regulated by the WSBA. Anytime I want to see my financial picture, I know my QuickBooks will be updated. I get a text and email whenever they have questions and answer them all in a portal.”
Alykhan Sunderji
The next step
Find out what your books and filings should actually look like.
20 minutes, no obligation, and a straight answer about whether we’re the right fit.