Title & Escrow Companies Bookkeeping in Oregon

Escrow and trust account requirements in Oregon are set by state law and by the underwriters you are appointed with, and they typically cover how funds are held, how frequently the account is reconciled, and what records must exist for each file. The reconciliation that satisfies all of them is the three-way: escrow bank balance, escrow book balance, and the sum of the individual file ledgers, agreeing at one point in time. Two of the three will frequently agree while the third does not, which is precisely why the third exists. The entity is registered with the Oregon Secretary of State, and because Oregon levies no statewide general sales tax there is no revenue account to maintain alongside it — one fewer Oregon registration to let lapse. We keep that reconciliation current and documented; whether it meets your specific Oregon obligation is a determination for you, your counsel, and your underwriter.

Oregon levies a real estate transfer or deed tax at closing, which means every file passes tax collected from the parties through your escrow account to a recording authority. It is pass-through in the purest sense — never income, never expense, simply money moving across your ledger — and files that run it through revenue can overstate a title company's income by a multiple. Recording fees and any state or county surcharge behave the same way, and the settlement statement is the source document that has to reconcile to what actually left the account.

Registering to do business in Oregon runs through the Oregon Secretary of State and employer accounts through the Oregon Employment Department. Because Oregon has no sales tax account to maintain, there is one less registration to let lapse than in most states.

Beyond sales tax, Oregon levies the Corporate Activity Tax (CAT) on commercial activity sourced to Oregon, less a partial subtraction for cost inputs or labour, payable by the business. despite the name it is not limited to corporations. Registration is triggered at a lower level of activity than the tax itself, so a business can be required to register while owing nothing. The consequence for your books is direct: the cost-input subtraction means the books have to separate cost of goods and labour cleanly enough to compute it — a chart of accounts that lumps them into general expense makes the return needlessly expensive to prepare. It is registered and filed separately from anything the Oregon Secretary of State handles, and it accrues on revenue rather than on profit — so it is recorded as it builds, not discovered at year end.