Every Source Deduction Filed On Its Date, With Proof It Landed
Source deductions are the most unforgiving deadline in your business. There is no filing season and no grace period. Each pay cycle produces an amount and a date, the date arrives whether or not anyone looked at it, and the penalty is arithmetic from the day after.
We calculate CPP, EI, and income tax as part of the same run that pays your people, then file the remittance electronically on its date. There is no separate charge for it, because it is not separate work. Your $200 payroll processing cycle covers the calculation, the filing, and the proof that it landed.
The penalty for a late remittance is not your bookkeeper’s problem
Whoever forgot, the assessment is issued against your corporation, and the interest keeps running while you find out about it. Unremitted source deductions also sit in a small category of debts where the CRA can look past the corporation to its directors personally. This is not a filing you want depending on somebody’s calendar reminder.
That is why the remittance is finished inside the same cycle as the run rather than parked on a month-end list. The withholding is calculated when the pay is calculated, the filing goes out on the date it is due, and nothing about it is waiting on a memory or an inbox.
What you withhold was never your money
The most common way employers get into trouble here is not fraud or carelessness. It is a cash-flow reflex. The deductions sit in the business account, the account looks healthy, a supplier needs paying, and the balance quietly becomes working capital.
The money you withhold from a paycheque was never yours. You are holding it for the government until the day it comes due.
Accountants who deal with this say the same thing to clients about GST, and it lands harder with payroll because the amounts recur every cycle. We treat each remittance as a fixed obligation with a date attached, not as a bill that flexes with the month. You always know what is owed, what is set aside, and what is genuinely available to spend.
Your remittance schedule changes as your payroll grows
Remitting is not a habit you set once. The CRA assigns your frequency based on how much you withhold on average, so a growing payroll can move you from monthly to twice a month, and further again after that. The letter announcing it does not arrive with a warning label.
Northeast Langley shows what that looks like in practice. The Gloucester Industrial Estates run to roughly 650 acres of trucking, logistics, and manufacturing with an Amazon distribution hub on site, and employers there add crews in blocks rather than one person at a time. Your withholding climbs with them. We watch that number as it grows and tell you before the schedule changes, so the first cycle on the new frequency is not the one that gets missed.
You get the filing confirmation, every single cycle
Plenty of owners have no way of knowing whether a filing was actually made. They know they paid for payroll, and they assume the rest happened. That assumption is exactly what turns into a surprise letter, and it is a genuinely reasonable assumption to make.
Each cycle, you get the amount remitted, the period it applies to, and the confirmation that it was accepted. It takes you about ten seconds to read and it means your payroll account with the CRA is never a black box you are trusting from the outside. If you ever want the full account history, it is yours, in your own file.
If you are behind already, that gets dealt with first
Missed remittances do not resolve themselves, and they compound in a specific way: the penalty is charged per occurrence, so several small late filings can cost more than one large one. Owners in that position tend to delay the phone call out of the same instinct that let it slide in the first place.
We start by reconciling your payroll account with the CRA period by period, so you know the real number rather than the one you are afraid of. Then arrears get filed, the current cycle goes back on schedule, and you get a plain explanation of what is owed and in what order to handle it. Nobody here needs to hear how it got this way.
CRA Remittance Filing FAQs
The CRA decides that from how much you withhold on average, and it is not a choice you make. Most smaller employers remit monthly, and as payroll grows the CRA moves you to remitting more often. They notify you by letter, which is exactly the kind of letter that gets filed and forgotten. We track your withholding as it climbs so the change is expected rather than discovered.
The penalty is a percentage of the amount you were supposed to send, starting at 3% and climbing toward 10% depending on how many days late it is, with interest running on top. Repeat failures can be assessed at a higher rate again. It is one of the few business costs where being four days late and being four weeks late are priced differently.
We calculate the deductions, prepare the remittance, and file it on the due date. The payment itself comes out of your own bank account, so you can see it leave and match it against the confirmation we send you. Your money never sits in an account of ours waiting to be forwarded to anyone.
Yes, and send it over before you reply to it. We pull your payroll account statement from the CRA, work out what was actually remitted against what was owed for each period, and find where the gap opened. Sometimes the amount is wrong, sometimes the payment was applied to the wrong period, and sometimes it is a real shortfall that needs a plan.
No. It is part of the $200 per cycle payroll fee, because remitting is not a separate task from running payroll. It is the same calculation finished properly. Charging separately for it would mean treating the filing as optional, and for an employer with staff on the books it never is.
