corporate taxes

So I was working as a consultant 2 years ago and a bit and was solo for my incorporation. I have been a full-time employee for the last year

I paid my accountant 1500$ to do my taxes last year, and with barely any revenue generated this year, my accountant is still charging me $900.

I'm shamefully a complete idiot when it comes to taxes, but I do know math at least… With that said, has anyone used U-File, Turbo Tax, or alike to do their own corporate taxes of similar incorporation scale? Is it easy enough for me to do it myself and/or is it worth paying an accountant this much???

I'm not specifically familiar with doing corporate taxes using U-File, Turbo Tax, etc. but I am familiar with corporate taxes in general - the software will probably require you to input financial statements into the tax return (an income statement as well as a balance sheet). I'm assuming that your accountant also put your financial statements together at the same time he did your tax return? If so, you would need to prepare these yourself this year. It isn't difficult but if you have absolutely no knowledge of accounting you might have a bit of trouble putting your balance sheet together (the income statement is pretty straight forward).

If you have any friends/family with basic accounting knowledge I would just bug them to help you out for an hour and you should be able to figure it out.

If there is software that can do corporate taxes, I'd fucking love to hear it.

Mr. [HTML_REMOVED] Mrs. ReductiMat are on the hook for $4,000k in accounting fees each year.. but I suspect it's money well spent (at least with audit insurance thrown in).

Paging L Hutz esq

buddy is the pro on this board

You can efile it with Future Tax, Tax Prep and a few others. You can get single file T2 licenses and they range from $80-$250ish.

Unless you have experience filing corporate T2 tax returns, do not do it yourself. There is also some tax planning and other things considered when preparing your year end.

Another option is see if the accountant will just perform a T2 engagement, where they just file your tax return. It would be cheaper and may be what you need.For a notice to reader/T2 filing $900 is pretty fair for a basic year end. In the end you get what you pay for. If you cheap out and cause problems it will cost you more time/money to correct it.

I am pretty knowledgeable in this area so PM me if you need some help.

Paging L Hutz esq

buddy is the pro on this board

Paging Rnayel. He's the resident Chief Financial Officer.

Well if you wana know what you can get away with … Bro is a tax lawyer

That's a good deal. The amount of revenue you earned has little impact on the labour required to create the corp's financials (GIFI it's called). I mean, if there was very little activity period in the corp then the financial statements are faster, but there's still a floor level of hours required to get it all done.

I wouldn't try it yourself unless you want to spend a bunch of time learning about accounting.

So I was working as a consultant 2 years ago and a bit and was solo for my incorporation. I have been a full-time employee for the last year

I paid my accountant 1500$ to do my taxes last year, and with barely any revenue generated this year, my accountant is still charging me $900.

I'm shamefully a complete idiot when it comes to taxes, but I do know math at least… With that said, has anyone used U-File, Turbo Tax, or alike to do their own corporate taxes of similar incorporation scale? Is it easy enough for me to do it myself and/or is it worth paying an accountant this much???

When you say you have "barely any revenue this year" - how little are you talking? If only have a few thousand dollars in revenue it would definitely suck to spend $900 to file a tax return. If this is the case you can probably get away with buying some generic software and preparing the T2 (with a little help from an accountant friend). If you have closer to $10k of revenue or above you probably just want to suck it up and pay the $900 because the accountant will probably have to do some slightly fancy accounting things that you might not be familiar with (like paying you dividends, preparing a T4, a T5, or paying you a management fee, etc.).

In the future if you don't want to have to file the T2 you could just bill your consulting services under your personal name and then you would include the income on your T1 instead. If you are only making a small amount of revenue as a consultant on an annual basis its probably not worth the hassle of having stuff continue to go through the corporation because the compliance costs would outweigh any potential tax savings.

Jesus…

X'r I just figure the sections. Where they go in the boxes is not really my area. Just curios as to why use the corp at all?

Ime $900 doesn't seem unreasonable.

X'r I just figure the sections. Where they go in the boxes is not really my area. Just curios as to why use the corp at all?

Ime $900 doesn't seem unreasonable.

Liability. For me, the software that I develop is mission critical. If I were to ever get sued, they can only go after my corporation, not my personal assets - AFAIK.

Paging Rnayel. He's the resident Chief Financial Officer.

Thanks for the shout out buddy. If you have specific questions relating to preparing your financial statements or tax return, feel free to PM me (I'm a CA with 12 years of experience).

My biased opinion is that hiring an accountant that you trust, that will follow you through your career is money well spent. You can often have your accountant throw in your T1 prep at a reduced fee (or free) if they are doing your T2.

Helping friends with small businesses, I've used Future Tax, but it isn't interview based, so you need a basic understanding of the tax act to get a full benefit out of it (names of schedules and what they are used for at a minimum).

CRA has a list of approved software here.

If your business is almost inactive, you can likely get away with doing it yourself, CRA staff are really helpful when you mess up, as long as you're OK with paying penalties and interest. Make sure to have last year's return on hand to input to whatever new software you are using. There are carry forward credits that you won't want to lose as well as a whole bunch of stuff that you'll want to maintain but that I won't explain here because I don't want to write a novel.

Good luck.

Liability. For me, the software that I develop is mission critical. If I were to ever get sued, they can only go after my corporation, not my personal assets - AFAIK.

Makes sense