Five ways your business will benefit from having a professional bookkeeper

Sometimes it’s easy to get caught up in the day-to-day business operations that you miss the little things that can add up to big and pricey mistakes. Whether it is a late GST filing or a missed payroll remittance payment, we are here to help with the financial side of your small business.

Here are five ways your business will benefit from having a professional bookkeeper in your corner:

1. We take on your deadlines. We take this so seriously that we will pay for late filing penalties that you incur if we miss one of your deadlines.
2. If you have cash-flow problems and owe money to the CRA for your various accounts, we can help prioritize your payments so that you are incurring the least amount of penalties.
3. Do you have employees OR you pay yourself a salary and remit source deductions?
   1. It is very easy to mess up payroll. We have found this is the number one area that clients always do incorrectly if they are doing their own bookkeeping. Even though the CRA has the online payroll calculator available to everyone, we have yet to see someone that has used it correctly.
   2. Consequences of payroll mistakes:
      1. Penalties and interest for late remittances are assessed on a monthly basis.
      2. Payroll non-compliance is considered by the CRA to be the worst offence. Eg We had a client who “did” her own T4. She calculated her own deductions, remitting wrong amounts and didn’t even file the T4 resulting in late filing penalties. This was a highly educated professional in her field who mishandled payroll. Even if you only have yourself on the same salary every month, it is still possible to do it incorrectly.
4. We will not file a return that is not reasonable by CRA standards.
   1. Our job is to keep you off of the CRA radar. We have filed thousands of returns of all types. We will let you know if a return does not make sense before we file it and could cause the CRA to investigate it. We will work with you to make it reasonable.
5. We have not had an audit that we were not expecting.
   1. Certain types of returns are red flags for audits eg. large GST refunds. We anticipate this, let the client know in advance that we are expecting this, and tell them how we are going to handle it.

Leave the books to your professional bookkeeper buddies and focus on what you love! 🙂