We offer tax preparation and filing for individuals and businesses, new business registrations, and small business bookkeeping services.
Yes we are! If you’re interested in any of our services, make sure to contact us! Or you can sign up to our client portal right away at the top of the page by clicking “Get Started.”
Yes, we ask all our clients to sign up for our encrypted client portal where we can send and receive documents, send messages securely, and offer signatures electronically, among other things.
Absolutely! Our secure client platform is much more secure than email, fully encrypted and password protected, and you’re able to access and download your information at any time on desktop or mobile. There’s even an app!
Nope. Some of our clients feel most comfortable doing business with us if they’ve at least seen our faces or heard our voices, which is perfectly fine, but a large chunk of our clients we’ve never actually spoken with on the phone or video chat! It’s completely up to you.
It may take us a little longer to get your information sorted out if you’re a paper client than if it were all online, but we love to serve our paper-only clients just as much as we love to serve our online-only clients.
Our preferred method of communication is the messaging feature inside our client portal. That way we know that any messages we exchange or documents we send and receive are all encrypted and safe. Until you’re setup there, you can contact us by email at info@clarkepartners.ca.
Unfortunately, we’ve had to remove our phone number from our online presence due to bots and solicitors. So if you’re interested in our services, please contact us by email (info@clarkepartners.ca) or through the “contact us” forms located throughout the website. Once we’re sure you’re not posing as a Nigerian prince or trying to sell us an incredible marketing package, we’re happy to speak on the phone if necessary.
We try our very best to respond within one business day. In rare cases we may take a touch longer to respond – sometimes it’s real busy around here!
Individual tax returns must be filed by the end of April, or the next business day if the end of April falls on a weekend. Individuals with business income, or married to individuals with business income, must be filed by June 15, though their tax payments are still due at the end of April.
Corporations must file 6 months after their fiscal year end. Depending on your business, your taxes might be payable either 2 months or 3 months after fiscal year end.
That depends entirely on you! Our process is very efficient for us, and typically clients will see turnaround times of between 1-4 weeks. Much of the turnaround time is depending on how quickly a client responds to requests for more information or document signatures. Also, the closer we get to the filing deadline, the longer it may take to turn around, as we generally get busier closer to April 30.
Absolutely. If you don’t have all your documents ready, it’s still a good idea to start the process, as we’ll need to get some preliminary information and signatures from you before we start the compilation process anyway.
There are six steps to our tax filing process:
Almost every taxpayer has an account with the Canada Revenue Agency. We ask you to give us access to that account to verify some details of your return from the CRA itself. The forms you’ll sign are called an “AuthRep,” which gives us authorization to represent an individual to the CRA, and/or an “AuthRepBus,” which does the same thing but for a business.
An individual should make sure they have (or will receive) any documents showing their income and any documents proving their deduction/credit information. If you’re not sure what those are, don’t worry! We make filing easy by asking you the right questions and prompting you to upload your documents right in our online portal, so you know you haven’t missed anything.
A business should make sure they have all of their income, expense, asset, and liability information current up to their year-end. Expenses should be sorted by category (eg. advertising, travel).
An individual or business will need to pay tax installments once their filed taxes owing reaches a certain threshold. For individuals, the threshold is reached when taxes owing at the time of filing are more than $3000 in the current year and in one of the previous two years. Individuals pay instalments quarterly. Generally, the CRA will contact you when they want you to start paying instalments.
For businesses, the threshold is reached when taxes owing at the time of filing are more than $3000 in the current year and previous year. Businesses pay instalments quarterly or monthly, depending on the type of business.
The Income Tax Act requires an individual or business owner to keep a record of any transactions or taxable events for at least six years. Common individual records would include T-slips like T4s and T5s, medical receipts, RRSP contributions, and many more. Common business records would include sales and expense information, asset information, and any documentation on deductions and credits needed to prove them. Basically any piece of information that you use in your tax return must be able to be proven, and you must keep it on file for at least six years.
Yes. Generally, a business will use the same numbers for filing a GST/HST return as filing an income tax return, so we are well equipped to file your HST return at the same time as your tax return.
Bookkeeping can include as much or as little work on our part as you would like. Some of our clients are more hands-on with their books than others.
Here are some services we can take care of for you:
– Full cycle accounting (categorizing all business-related transactions including reconciliations and month-end/year-end transactions)
– Providing monthly financial updates on your business’ progress
– GST/HST tracking, reporting and filing
– Payroll services
– Inventory tracking software/services
– Billing and Accounts Receivable tracking
– Bills and Accounts Payable tracking
Good bookkeeping will do several things for your business:
1. It provides a clear financial picture of your business’ financial situation, including income, expenses, assets, and liabilities.
2. That clear picture of your financial situation allows you to better budget and plan for growth by targeting well-performing revenue streams and cutting excess expenses.
3. Good bookkeeping allows for accurate tax preparation and planning.
Firstly, we’ll ask you a bunch of questions about your business so that we can get a baseline of the type of work we’ll be doing with you.
How it works after that depends entirely on your processes already in place.
Unless your business is completely fresh, you will already have some processes set up to send out invoices and receive payments. We can either work with what you have or help you implement new solutions.
Generally, you will need to keep track of your transactions in a location that we can access, so that we can categorize them as they come in. Using dedicated bookkeeping software helps tremendously with this, as we can connect your business bank account to the software and cut down on a lot of time spent.
We are certified Quickbooks Online Proadvisors, so our preferred software is Quickbooks Online for small business accounting. If you use another solution, we are happy to continue using it with you.
Send us an email at info@clarkepartners.ca or fill out the contact form below. You can also hit the “Get Started” button at the top of your screen to sign right up to our client portal, and we’ll take it from there.
At the beginning of the engagement, we’ll estimate the time required and provide a quote for a recurring invoice to provide services.
The more complicated the books, and the more services you’d like us to provide, the more expensive the bookkeeping will be.
