Working from home became widely popular during Covid-19, it was a new experience for most people with dining rooms becoming offices and kitchens the new break room. While working from home has become the new norm, the way you have been claiming your home office expenses is about to change! Here is the new home office change for 2023 tax year: Most people took advantage of the quick method of declaring home office expenses during Covid times. This allowed eligible employees to claim $2 for each day they worked from home between 2020-2022 due to the pandemic. Unfortunately, the temporary flat ra ..read more

So you snagged your Christmas gifts and hung the ornaments on your tree, and it’s the early days of December! Now you’re thinking about how you can maximize your savings come tax time in 2024. Who are you? Santa’s coming to your house, no doubt! We don’t have a naughty or nice list but we do have a list of productive ways you can tackle your tax-time angst NOW and stay on top this holiday season. Year-End Benefits for Salaried Employees: Evaluate your income: You should evaluate your income and current RRSP contributions. This will allow you to determine if you need to make or want to make ..read more

Do you have two jobs?  If the answer is yes, then you need to make sure your employer is deducting enough tax from each pay cheque to ensure you don’t end up owing taxes when you file your tax return. Usually, when you become an employee, you will be asked to fill out TD1 forms for Federal and Provincial taxes. You need to complete both of these forms with each employer. If you fill both forms out in the standard way, you are asking your employer to apply the basic personal exemption to your paycheques (a non-refundable tax credit that can be claimed by all individuals to your annual inco ..read more

Many Canadian small businesses that took a hit during the pandemic benefited from the Canada Emergency Business Account (CEBA) interest-free loan in 2020/2021. The program was set up to provide relief to faltering businesses who needed help to stay afloat. For those who still have an outstanding loan, we are pleased to inform you that the federal government has extended the repayment deadline from December 31, 2023, to January 18, 2024, in recognition of the busy end of the year for many businesses. IMPORTANT: If your business has been informed that it is not eligible for loan forgiveness, you ..read more

Over the past couple of months, the most frequently asked questions were: What is instalment interest and how can I avoid it? If you would like to learn more about calculating and paying tax installments you can do so by visiting one of our previous blog posts that details this topic.  In this post, we will delve deeper into instalment interest and how to avoid this charge.  Instalment interest is a super grey area with the CRA because not all individuals are sent instalment reminders, but may still be charged instalment interest. If you want to avoid interest, pay your instalments b ..read more

At some point in time, either for your business or personal income taxes, you’ve probably needed to pay business taxes to the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA). On May 30th, 2023 our Lady in Charge Teya Jensen had a moment of panic when she noticed her personal bank Royal Bank of Canada (RBC), Canada’s largest banking institution, removed its option to make payments to the CRA using Interac Online Payments. She immediately thought “Gasp! Will RBC customers have to physically visit the bank and stand in line to pay the CRA?” Thankfully, after a quick bit of research, she discovered the world wasn’t e ..read more

A sad story of a forgotten receipt. Once upon a time, it was a wrinkle-free, crisp piece of paper with dark, glossy lettering. But then strong currents of life got in the way and tore it away from your grasp. It was nowhere to be found. The end. Photo by Mike Walter on Unsplash   Drowning in piles of receipts that you have to keep stuffed away for 7 years is quickly becoming a nightmare of the past. Thanks to some much-needed innovations in bookkeeping technology our prayers for electronic receipt submission have been answered. Now we get it, technology can be scary, challenging and somet ..read more

While the coronavirus has made travelling difficult, it has also created an avenue for more people to work online. We expect to see an increase in digital nomads in the coming years as travel restrictions begin to ease. Our goal is to ensure that your lifestyle remains an adventure of the fun kind and not one that involves a CRA audit. 1. Open separate accounts As a digital nomad, it is easy to fall into the trap of having all your personal and business transactions happen in one account. Operating this way can create a lot of extra work at tax time and lead to challenges if you need to apply ..read more

Covid-19 has pushed a lot of businesses online and created an unprecedented surge in e-commerce growth. While many consumers are excited to return to in-person shopping, we cannot underestimate the need for e-commerce options. Platforms such as Amazon and Shopify have created the perfect avenue for small/medium-sized businesses to expand their market reach locally and abroad. However, while there are many exciting benefits to “going online,” the process of bookkeeping when using e-commerce platforms can be overwhelming due to running different platforms, the fees associated with sales and the ..read more

Starting a new business can be quite costly. Here are  5 free small biz applications that we recommend you use when starting out. They are all very user-friendly and can be upgraded to provide more advanced options once you have more income to invest. Hubspot CRM If you are looking for a free Customer Relationship Manager (CRM) then Hubspot is great. It links up to your Gmail so that you can create a new contact, opportunity or task directly from your Gmail account. You can attach important emails to your contact so that the information is kept in one place, set custom fields that al ..read more