Collected, Tracked, Claimed, Filed
Income tax waits until you have made money. GST and HST do not. They attach to transactions, so the liability grows every time you raise an invoice, in a strong quarter and a bad one alike, whether or not anybody is tracking it. That is how a profitable business meets a sales tax bill it has no way to pay.
Each period we calculate what you collected, net it against the credits you can claim on what you bought, and file on your schedule. The figures come out of the same reconciled books that later carry into your T2 corporate return, so a coding error caught in March never reaches your year end.
The tax you are holding is not part of your balance
The account balance is the problem. Tax you collected lands in the same place as revenue, looks identical to it on a banking app, and quietly makes the business appear to be doing better than it is. Owners spend it without ever deciding to.
We report the position every month rather than once at filing, so you always know what portion of that balance is spoken for. Where the temptation is real, a separate account and a transfer on the same day each month solves it permanently. It is an unsophisticated fix and the most effective one we have.
Charging the right rate when the work is somewhere else
Surrey issues business licences to companies with no premises there at all, plumbers, electricians, and general contractors licensed purely because the work happens on-site inside the city. That is the ordinary shape of a trades corporation here: the office in one municipality, the revenue earned in five others.
Cross a provincial line and it stops being a formality. Which rate applies depends on where the supply takes place, not where your office sits, so the same crew can invoice at five percent for a job in BC and thirteen for one in Ontario. Work on real property follows the property. Getting it wrong costs in both directions, since tax you failed to charge still comes out of your margin and tax you charged in error has to be refunded.
Every credit you are owed, claimed while the paperwork still exists
The credit side is where most money is quietly lost, and it never announces itself. Tools bought on a personal card, software charged to the owner, a vehicle expense split between business and personal use, fuel receipts in a glovebox. None of it is claimed, because none of it made it into the books.
A credit only exists for a purchase that was recorded and coded correctly, which is why the claiming happens as transactions are entered inside your monthly bookkeeping rather than during a hunt through the year at filing time. Over a full year in a business with real equipment and material costs, that difference is not a rounding error.
The number is known before the deadline, not discovered on it
No sales tax bill is fun to receive. There is a large difference between one you have watched approach for three months and one that appears in full on the day it is due.
Because the calculation runs with the monthly close, you see the running position all year. If the amount is going to be uncomfortable you know in advance and have time to act, whether that is holding cash back, adjusting what you draw, or arranging terms with the CRA before you are in default rather than after. Staying current is also what keeps a manageable balance from becoming a collections file.
GST/HST Return Filing FAQs
Once your worldwide taxable revenue passes $30,000 over four consecutive quarters, registration stops being optional. Below that you can register voluntarily, and for businesses buying equipment or materials it is often worth doing, because registration is what lets you claim the tax back on your own purchases. Incorporated operating businesses are almost always past the threshold already.
The CRA assigns a frequency based on your annual taxable revenue. Most businesses under $1.5 million are assigned annual filing, between $1.5 million and $6 million is quarterly, and above that is monthly. You can elect to file more often than you are required to, and for businesses that struggle to hold the money aside, filing quarterly instead of annually is usually the healthier choice.
You file them, oldest first, and the sooner that starts the smaller it stays. Interest accrues on the balance and a late-filing penalty applies once the CRA has demanded a return. The awkward part is usually not the filing itself, it is that the periods cannot be calculated properly until the underlying books for those months have been rebuilt.
Generally no. Most exports of goods and services to non-residents are zero-rated, which means you charge tax at zero percent but still claim the credits on everything you bought to deliver that work. That combination is why zero-rated is very different from exempt, and why getting the classification right on your invoices matters more than most owners expect.
Usually it is a pre-assessment or post-assessment review, which is narrower than an audit and normally resolved by sending the documentation behind specific claims. It becomes a problem when the receipts backing those claims were never filed with the transactions. We keep the support attached as we go, so a request like this is a matter of retrieving documents rather than reconstructing a case.
