Many people have heard about tax season but they think it occurs in April. The sad truth is that tax season starts on January 1st and does not end until the end of June.
Imagine a six month busy season. You can see why accountants are so cranky. It starts in January with the January 15th deadline to pay the last of the 2017 source deductions. This means that we have to figure out all the taxable benefits and check to see that the proper amount of deductions have been taken and sent to CRA. January 31st is the day to file the last HST return for 2017.
February is the T4 and T5 month and we have to do a bunch of bookkeeping. Usually to figure out how much money some of our clients have removed from their companies which needs to be reported as dividends.
March is T3’s month, the start of personal tax season and we are working on December year-ends.
April is pretty much all personal tax, because some of the documents we need to do a personal tax return are not available until the beginning of April. The returns are due at the end of April.
May is bad, because many people call to ask us to do something they did not call about in April because they thought we were busy. The March non-profit year-ends must be done this month because they only have 90 days to have their AGM’s. We are still working on the December year-ends and the late personal tax returns.
June 15th is the personal tax deadline for self-employed people, many of whom are procrastinators so they don’t file in April. June 30th is the last chance to file the corporate income tax returns for the December year-ends.
In July I am tired and I often tell people that I am not going to go through that again. By August I have gotten some sleep and I start thinking that the winter is not that bad. So, if you want to buy my accounting practice, July is the month for that!
No comments yet.