Payroll Services near you

The Canada Revenue Agency sets out the core duties: open a payroll account, calculate the deductions and contributions on the amounts you pay, remit them, and report the income and deductions. Getting the first step right matters because the calculation depends on facts the employer supplies, including the employee's province of employment and the completed personal tax credit forms, and because whether a worker is an employee or self-employed is a question of the actual relationship rather than what the parties call it.

How often you remit depends on your remitter type. Quarterly remitters send deductions after each calendar quarter, on due dates in January, April, July and October; regular remitters remit monthly, with the payment due on the fifteenth day of the following month; accelerated remitters, whose payrolls are larger, remit more frequently, in some cases twice a month and in others within a few working days of each part of the month. The agency applies a penalty and charges interest on remittances that are late or missing, with heavier consequences for repeated failures, and requires a final remittance within seven calendar days when a business stops operating or changes its legal status.

Most payroll failures are not calculation errors; they are timing and classification failures. A remittance sent late attracts a penalty and interest regardless of whether the money was always there, and because the obligation belongs to the employer, a provider's mistake does not remove it. Treating a worker as self-employed when the relationship is really employment is the other expensive one, since the unremitted deductions and contributions can be assessed afterwards, along with interest.

After the calendar year, the employer files an information return summarizing what was paid and withheld, and gives each employee their slip. For the T4 and related returns, the Canada Revenue Agency's filing due date is the last day of February following the calendar year the return covers, and a return is on time if it is received or postmarked on or before that date; where the date falls on a weekend or a public holiday, the next business day applies. Late filing can attract penalties, so a provider's year-end timetable is worth agreeing in advance rather than discovering in February.

Year end is also a reconciliation exercise, and it is where errors made months earlier surface. The totals on the slips have to agree with what was remitted through the year; a difference means either a remittance was wrong or something was missed in the calculation, and it is far easier to find in January than after the filing. Ask your provider how they reconcile, when they will send drafts for review, and how corrections are handled if an amended slip turns out to be necessary.

Running payroll in-house with software is workable for a small, stable team paid the same way each period, and it keeps the knowledge inside the business. It gets harder as soon as the payroll includes variable hours across provinces, taxable benefits, frequent turnover or leaves, because each of those is a rule to apply correctly every cycle, and because one person holding all of it is a single point of failure when they are away on a pay day.

An accounting or bookkeeping firm that already handles your books can run payroll with the advantage that the entries land in the accounts properly and year end reconciles. A dedicated payroll provider brings scale: employee self-service, deadline tracking and staff who do nothing else. The decision usually turns on complexity and on who you want answering an employee's question about their pay. Whichever you choose, keep visibility of your own payroll account so you can confirm that remittances and filings are being made.