Bookkeeping that keeps CRA off your back and your evenings free
Bookkeeping for Canadian small businesses — monthly books, GST/HST, payroll, and a year-end package your accountant can actually work from. And, on the pages below, straight answers to the questions that brought you here.
The short version. Bookkeeping is not hard arithmetic. It's hard because CRA runs four separate calendars — GST/HST, payroll, T4s and year-end — and missing one of them costs real money. Being three days late on a payroll remittance is a 3% penalty under CRA's late-remitting rules, charged on the whole remittance. Not the interest. The penalty.
Start with the question you actually came with
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I'm behind on my books
Months or years behind. What catch-up work involves, what CRA is charging you while you wait, and how the Voluntary Disclosures Program changed in October 2025.
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What does a bookkeeper cost?
The only independently sourced wage data in this market, why retail rates sit well above it, and the questions that make two quotes comparable.
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When is this due?
GST/HST, payroll remittances, T4s, T2, personal instalments. Every deadline in one table, with the rule behind each one.
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Do I even need a bookkeeper yet?
Five moments that say yes — and an honest description of the situation where the answer is still no.
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Something looks wrong in my books
Twelve specific things a bookkeeper checks to tell whether your numbers are real — starting with the GST/HST account that never clears.
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My accountant wants my year-end
Exactly what to hand over, for a sole proprietor and for a corporation, so you're not paying an accountant's hourly rate to sort receipts.
Why this site publishes its sources
Search for what a bookkeeper costs in Canada and you'll find a dozen pages quoting confident salary ranges. Compare them. They contradict each other by more than ten thousand dollars, and not one of them says where its number came from.
There is a real number. The Government of Canada's Job Bank publishes wage data for bookkeepers (NOC 12200) drawn from Statistics Canada's Labour Force Survey: a national median of $28.02 an hour, with a low of $19.55 and a high of $45.07. That's a public figure, updated on a known schedule, and it is on the page about what bookkeeping costs along with an honest explanation of why retail service rates sit well above it.
Every CRA figure on this site works the same way. It comes from canada.ca, it's linked inline, and the source's own last-updated date is shown so you can tell whether you're reading something current. Where CRA doesn't publish an answer — and on the question of what triggers an audit, it genuinely doesn't — the page says so instead of guessing.
Wage data: Job Bank wage report for bookkeepers, NOC 12200, Labour Force Survey, Statistics Canada; wages updated November 19, 2025.
What we do
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Monthly books
Accounts reconciled every month, so a duplicated supplier payment surfaces in April while you can still get the money back — not the following February when it's just a number in a report.
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GST/HST
Your return filed on your reporting period's actual due date, so you stop paying CRA's prescribed interest — 7% for both Q3 and Q4 of 2026 — for the privilege of having been busy.
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Payroll
Remittances made on your remitter type's schedule, so you never find out what CRA's 3% penalty for being one to three days late feels like on a full month's source deductions.
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Year-end preparation
A clean, reconciled package handed to your accountant, so their invoice covers tax work instead of an afternoon spent sorting your receipts at their hourly rate.
What each of these covers in detail, and what we refer out.
CRA figures on this page: penalty for late remitting or failure to remit (CRA page updated 2026-06-11) and CRA's prescribed interest rates index, which is where to check the current rate — it is reset every quarter.
What we don't do
Bookkeeping and accounting are different jobs, and a bookkeeper who blurs the line is a warning sign rather than a bargain. Tax planning, salary-versus-dividend decisions, incorporation strategy, Voluntary Disclosures Program applications, and anything requiring an audit or review engagement all go to an accountant. Those referrals are written into the scope section of the services page so there's no ambiguity about it later.
Find out what your books would actually cost
A quote needs the real numbers — how many accounts, how many transactions a month, whether payroll and GST/HST are in scope. Send those and you'll get a fixed monthly figure instead of a range, so you can budget for it rather than wonder about it.
Questions people actually ask
Do I need a bookkeeper and an accountant, or just one?
Most incorporated businesses end up with both, and they do different jobs. A bookkeeper keeps the day-to-day records straight through the year — transactions coded, accounts reconciled, GST/HST and payroll filed on time. An accountant uses those records to prepare and file the tax return and to advise on structure and tax planning.
The two roles are complementary in a specific way: an accountant's fee is usually hourly or scoped, and if the books arrive unreconciled, a chunk of that fee gets spent on bookkeeping at accounting rates. Clean books make the accountant cheaper. The detail is on the page covering what your accountant needs from you at year-end.
Is my business too small for a bookkeeper?
Possibly, and this site says so plainly rather than pretending otherwise. If you're a sole proprietor under the $30,000 GST/HST small supplier threshold, with a separate business bank account and a couple of dozen transactions a month, you can very reasonably do this yourself.
The picture changes when you register for GST/HST, hire your first employee, or incorporate — because each of those adds a CRA filing obligation with its own deadline and its own penalty for missing it. The page on when it's actually time to hire a bookkeeper walks through each trigger.
How current are the numbers on this site?
Every CRA figure was checked against its canada.ca source page, and the verification date is shown in the footer of every page. Each figure is linked to the government page it came from, and where that page shows its own last-updated date, that date is quoted too.
Some of these change on a known cycle. The prescribed interest rate is reset quarterly. CPP, CPP2 and EI maximums change every January. Where a figure moves like that, the page says so and links CRA's index page rather than a single quarter, so a stale number is easy to spot.
Do you work with businesses outside your own province?
Yes. Bookkeeping is done remotely, and the federal rules that drive most of the work — GST/HST, payroll source deductions, T4s, corporate and personal filing deadlines — are the same across the country.
Provincial differences do exist, particularly around sales tax in the provinces with HST or their own provincial sales tax, workers' compensation coverage, and employment standards. Quebec is the significant exception, because it runs a parallel system through Revenu Québec including its own pension plan, and that needs a Quebec-specific answer rather than a national one.
What software do you work in?
Whatever you already use, in most cases. Moving a business between accounting platforms mid-year is disruptive and rarely worth it unless the current setup is genuinely blocking something.
One thing worth settling early, whoever you hire: whose subscription the file lives on. If your books sit inside a bookkeeper's own software account, find out before you sign what happens to your data if you part ways. That question is on the list of things to ask on the page about vetting a bookkeeper.