Slips That Tie Back to Every Pay Run Behind Them
Every T4 you file is a claim about twelve months that have already happened. If the payroll behind it drifted at any point during the year, February is when that surfaces, in front of your employees and in front of the CRA at the same time.
Slip preparation is included with your payroll, and it is built from your actual pay records rather than a summary screen. Each employee’s year-to-date earnings, deductions, and taxable benefits are reconciled line by line, then filed with the CRA and distributed to your people by the deadline.
The year gets checked before the slips go out, not after
The reconciliation is not a formality. It compares each person’s slip against the actual pay runs, and then compares the totals on your summary against what your payroll account received across the year. A gap there is the single most common reason an employer hears from the CRA after year-end, because their system checks that pairing automatically and generates a letter when the two do not agree.
Finding a shortfall in January means correcting it while it is still a small number with a plan attached. Finding it in June means explaining a filed slip that is already sitting on an employee’s personal tax return, which is a different and much slower conversation.
Employees and contractors do not get the same slip
The distinction is not paperwork trivia. It reflects who is on your payroll and who is not, and the CRA looks at the substance rather than what you called the arrangement.
| Slip | Who gets it, and what it reports |
|---|---|
| T4 | Who: Anyone on your payroll, with tax withheld |
| Reports: Employment income, CPP, EI, and taxable benefits | |
| T4A | Who: A contractor you pay for services |
| Reports: Fees only, with no source deductions taken |
Burnaby carries more than 60% of BC’s sound stage capacity, and the production service companies orbiting those studios are the clearest version of this problem: a project ends with some people having been on payroll and others having invoiced, and the two lists have to be separated correctly before either can be filed. We sort your list in the same way, and if someone is on the wrong side of it, that is a conversation for January rather than an assumption baked into a filing.
A late slip is priced per slip, which is why headcount changes the risk
Employers often assume a late information return means one flat fine. It does not. The penalty scales with the number of slips involved, so an employer with twenty people has considerably more exposure than one with three, and the amount is fixed by how many people you employ rather than by how sorry you are.
That is also why the work does not start in February. Your slips are effectively assembled through the year, because every payroll run is reconciled as it happens. By the time the deadline arrives there is nothing to reconstruct, only a review to complete and a filing to submit.
Your people bring their slip questions straight to you
An employee holding a T4 that does not look like their year is not going to call a government line about it. They are going to knock on your door in the middle of a workday, usually while they are trying to finish their own return.
You should be able to answer that. When we file, you get the slips, the summary, and a plain-language note on anything that looks unusual: a taxable benefit that changed, a retroactive payment, a person who worked part of the year. If someone does query their slip, forward it to us and you will have an answer within one business day, along with an amended slip if one is genuinely warranted.
T4 and T4A Preparation FAQs
The last day of February for the previous calendar year, and that same date is the deadline to get copies into your employees' hands. Both halves matter. Filing on time while your staff wait until April for their slips still leaves people unable to do their own taxes, and they will ask you about it rather than the CRA.
As a general rule, fees for services over $500 in a calendar year call for a T4A. The line is not always obvious, particularly with suppliers who invoice through their own corporation or who bill you for materials and labour together. We go through your vendor list with you in January rather than guessing in February.
It gets amended. We issue a corrected slip marked as amended, file it with the CRA, and give the employee a replacement copy with a short explanation they can hand to whoever prepares their personal return. The correction is straightforward. What matters is catching it before the employee has already filed on the wrong number.
Yes, and it is a common way people start with us. We rebuild the year-to-date totals per employee from your pay records and bank activity, compare them against what was actually remitted to the CRA, and tell you what we find before anything is filed. If the underlying payroll was messy, you will know that in January while there is still time.
Because the CRA compares them automatically. Their system checks the CPP and EI reported on your slips against what your payroll account actually received during the year, and a gap generates a review letter asking you to explain or pay the difference. Reconciling the two before filing is what keeps that letter from arriving.
