Anchorage is a unified home-rule municipality - the city and the borough are one government. From Downtown and Midtown to Spenard, South Anchorage, Eagle River, and Girdwood, Tides handles the books for small businesses across all of it. 100% remote. Clean books every month.
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The Municipality of Anchorage is a unified home-rule municipality: unlike most of the country, there is no separate city government and borough government here. One assembly, one mayor, one set of local filings. Roughly 40% of every Alaskan lives inside its boundaries.
Anchorage is where Alaska's economy plugs into the rest of the world. Ted Stevens Anchorage International Airport is one of the busiest cargo airports on the planet, the Port of Alaska lands a huge share of the state's inbound goods, and the Alaska Railroad is headquartered here. Layer on Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson, the oil and gas corporate offices, the hospital systems, and the Alaska Native regional corporations, and you get an unusually deep small business ecosystem.
That ecosystem is what we book for: freight brokers and 3PLs, defense subcontractors, medical practices, trades, professional services firms, and the restaurants and retailers that serve all of them.
Wherever your business sits, we serve the whole area with the same level of service. We are 100% remote, so your exact location does not change anything about how we work.
Alaska's largest city and the state's commercial center - and because Anchorage is a unified city-borough, the city page and this page cover the same jurisdiction.
Law firms, agencies, engineering and consulting shops, Alaska Native corporation offices, and the hotel and restaurant trade that runs on the summer visitor season.
Lake Hood, the world's busiest seaplane base, plus the freight, charter, and air-taxi operators clustered around Ted Stevens International.
Dimond Blvd and the Old Seward corridor - retail, auto services, dental and medical practices, and home service contractors.
The Glenn Highway commuter belt inside the municipality - trades, contractors, and family-owned service businesses.
Alyeska Resort and the Seward Highway corridor - lodging, guiding, food and beverage, and heavily seasonal cash flow.
Booking for Anchorage means understanding a city that is simultaneously a global air-cargo hub, a garrison town, an energy headquarters, and the service center for the entire state.
Anchorage began in 1915 as a tent camp for the Alaska Railroad and never stopped being a logistics town. The 1964 Good Friday earthquake - the most powerful ever recorded in North America - flattened parts of downtown and Turnagain, and the rebuild set the shape of the modern city. The Prudhoe Bay discovery and the Trans-Alaska Pipeline boom of the 1970s then turned Anchorage into the corporate capital of Alaska energy.
The single most important thing to understand about Anchorage's economy is geography as a business model. Anchorage sits within roughly 9.5 hours' flying time of about 90% of the industrialized world, which is exactly why Ted Stevens International became one of the busiest cargo airports anywhere. Federal cargo transfer rights let foreign carriers swap freight in Anchorage without it counting as a domestic stop - a legal quirk that built an entire logistics industry.
Add the Port of Alaska, which handles a large share of everything that arrives in the state, and Anchorage becomes the place where goods, money, and paperwork for the whole of Alaska pass through. That means a lot of freight brokers, customs and logistics firms, warehousing operations, and the accountants who have to make sense of their books.
Alaska has no state sales tax and no state personal income tax — which is exactly why so many business owners get Alaska tax wrong. More than 100 local jurisdictions levy their own sales tax, and the rules change borough by borough and city by city.
Anchorage is the counterintuitive one. Alaska has no state sales tax and no state personal income tax - and unlike most of Alaska's other communities, the Municipality of Anchorage does not levy a general local sales tax either. Anchorage funds itself primarily through property tax, under a voter-approved tax cap.
Rates shown are as of 2026 and can change. Always confirm the current rate with the taxing jurisdiction before you rely on it. Tides keeps your books tax-ready and works alongside your CPA — we do not file returns for you.
Seven core services, all delivered remotely. Everything your business needs to stay financially clean and tax-ready year-round.
Our flagship service. Every transaction categorized, every account reconciled, and clean financial reports delivered to your inbox each month — without you lifting a finger. The financial foundation every Alaska business deserves.
Behind on your books? We clean up any backlog — whether it is 3 months or 3 years — so you can move forward with accurate, up-to-date records.
New business or inherited a mess? We configure QuickBooks, connect your accounts, and build a chart of accounts that actually makes sense for your industry — including landed cost and job costing where Alaska demands it.
Monthly reconciliation of every bank account and credit card — ensuring your books match your statements and no transactions fall through the cracks.
P&L statements, balance sheets, and cash flow reports delivered monthly in a format you can actually understand and act on.
We keep your AP and AR organized so you always know what is coming in, what is going out, and what is overdue.
We make sure your payroll expenses hit your books correctly and stay in sync with your payroll processor every pay period — including seasonal crews.
We understand the financial patterns of the industries that actually drive this economy — not a generic list copied from somewhere in the Lower 48.
Freight brokers, 3PLs, ground handlers, customs paperwork
Job costing, short build seasons, subcontractor 1099s
JBER contracts, government billing, allowable-cost tracking
North Slope rotations, per diem, equipment depreciation
Insurance billing coordination, payroll, practice management
COGS, tip payroll, the 5% retail alcohol tax filing
Agent commissions, rentals, the 12% room tax on short-term stays
Consultants, agencies, engineers - clean monthly financials
"We run a small freight brokerage out of Midtown and our books were a disaster - three brokers, hundreds of loads a month, and carrier settlements we could never tie out. Tides rebuilt our chart of accounts around loads and lanes, cleaned up fourteen months of backlog, and now we actually know our margin per lane. First time in six years our CPA had nothing to fix."
Correct - the Municipality of Anchorage levies no general sales tax, and Alaska has no state sales tax either, so ordinary retail sales in Anchorage are untaxed at both levels. But Anchorage does levy targeted taxes: a 12% room tax on short-term lodging, a 5% retail alcohol sales tax, plus tobacco, marijuana, and rental-vehicle taxes. So a hardware store has no local sales tax filing while the bar next door does. Rates are current as of 2026 - confirm with the Municipality before you rely on them.
Just one. Anchorage is a unified home-rule municipality, so the city and the borough are the same government. There is no separate borough assembly, no separate borough tax, and no second set of local filings. This is genuinely simpler than most of the Lower 48.
Possibly - and this trips up a lot of Anchorage sellers. Anchorage having no sales tax does not exempt you from communities that do have one. If you deliver into places like Juneau, Sitka, Kodiak, or Bethel, the Alaska Remote Sellers Sales Tax Commission (ARSSTC) is the single point of registration and filing. The threshold is $100,000 in gross statewide sales in the current or prior calendar year. The 200-transaction test was removed effective January 1, 2025, so transaction count no longer matters.
Yes. Defense subcontractors and oilfield service firms are two of the most bookkeeping-intensive business types in Anchorage - government billing, allowable versus unallowable cost separation, per diem, equipment depreciation, and rotational payroll. We keep the records clean and audit-ready and work alongside your CPA or contract accountant on the compliance side.
No. If you do not have QuickBooks Online, we set it up as part of onboarding. If you already have an account, we connect to it and clean it up as needed. We also connect Puzzle.io for real-time dashboards and an instant snapshot of your books before regular monthly service begins.
Pricing is based on your monthly transaction volume, not your zip code. Most small businesses land between $395 and $895 per month. You get an exact quote during your free consultation - no guesswork, no setup fees.
Alaska does not border another state, so we do not pretend to serve one. We serve Alaska — from Southeast to the Interior to the Y-K Delta.
Schedule a free 15-minute consultation. Tell us about your business and we will give you a clear picture of where your books stand and what it costs to fix them.
No setup fees · Cancel anytime · First month guaranteed
Official government resources for registering, filing, and staying compliant. Tides handles your books; these help with the rest.