Calculating statutory holiday pay is tricky. We'll describe it here. Calculating it in different provinces is tricky too; labour laws are a provincial jurisdiction. This means rules change. Examples will contrast Alberta and British Columbia (BC). Note: This article describes...

When a shareholder uses his or her own vehicle in the course of business in Canada, deductions from company revenue can be claimed. But you have to know the rules of the taxation road to avoid a collision with...

Here are two good rules of thumb for paying Canadian GST: Pay the least you have to, and wait to pay them until the very last minute!  One business tax is Canada's Good & Services Tax (GST). The 5% tax...

Expecting more that $30,000 in annual revenue from your business? Then you must obtain a GST number from the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA). It's easily obtained with a call (including their hold time!) to the CRA. Do You Need a...

You made a sale. You made several sales. Hooray! Now, how do you record it/them in your books? Well, that depends. On what? On your terms of the sale. Let me explain. For most small businesses a sale happens under one of...

Meals are a common part of business. You take a client to dinner or lunch to say thank for their business. Or you buy a couple of pizzas to say thanks to your employees for some great effort getting...

Two general contractor friends had a chat over coffee the other day. A fly on the wall would have overheard the following: Contractor 1: “My sales in the last six months were good. I closed $645,000 in projects. I did...

Just so you know, YES!, we have received big bunches of disorganized receipts in shoeboxes. It really does happen! But, we should try to avoid that. The Bookkeeping Department understands that every expense counts and you want to keep your...

I was asked recently to estimate the number of hours to help catch-up a business owner's bookkeeping. He said he needed about 8 months of catch-up, averaging about 30 transactions per month. My first 'guesstimate' was 16 hours, while he guessed...