Corporate Year Ends

[Circa89]

Just curious if anyone out there is familiar with Corporate Tax returns.

I have my own business (Alberta Registered Corporation) where I have always had an accountant do my year end. This year I essentially transformed the business from full time to part time and I am curious if :

a) I am allowed to do my own corporate return or there is some law stating that I have to have a third party be appointed accountant?

b) Is it that difficult? I can not justify giving an accountant $1400 to do a return for me when I only had $20000 in sales. Even if it takes 10 hours I can not see paying an accountant $140 an hour when I owe no taxes.

I have a blank T2 ready to go and there are only 10 pages so it can't be that difficult can it?

Any input would be great.

[Sliver]

You aren't required to have an accountant do your books, I know that for sure.

[The Yen Man]

It's 10 pages for the T2, but there is other schedules you have to fill out depending on what you need to do. You also have to generate your own financial statements in order to fill out your General Index of Financial Information (Schedule 100-101).

You can use programs such as Cantax to file electronically. Or if you're cheap like me (and your business generates less than $1M in revenue), you can fill it out the old fashioned way. I used Cantax to generate all the info, and then filled everything out by hand (Cantax will let you fill everything out electronically, but won't let you print them until you pay).

[The Yen Man]

Just to add as well, I found this out from a friend. Apparently it's actually ok (as in there's no penalties or fines) if you don't file a T2 if your business didn't make any profit. The only risk is that it opens your business up to a higher chance of being audited.

[lucky1]

Originally Posted by Circa89

Just curious if anyone out there is familiar with Corporate Tax returns.

I have my own business (Alberta Registered Corporation) where I have always had an accountant do my year end. This year I essentially transformed the business from full time to part time and I am curious if :

a) I am allowed to do my own corporate return or there is some law stating that I have to have a third party be appointed accountant?

b) Is it that difficult? I can not justify giving an accountant $1400 to do a return for me when I only had $20000 in sales. Even if it takes 10 hours I can not see paying an accountant $140 an hour when I owe no taxes.

I have a blank T2 ready to go and there are only 10 pages so it can't be that difficult can it?

Any input would be great.

$1400?? you could always find an acct who wont rape you with his charges....Talk to Hakim Kapasi at Kapasi and associates, he specializes in small company accounting and is very reasonable

[Circa89]

Originally Posted by lucky1

$1400?? you could always find an acct who wont rape you with his charges....Talk to Hakim Kapasi at Kapasi and associates, he specializes in small company accounting and is very reasonable

Fair enough and that is why I am asking. My Accountant when I made money was $2500 for a return, which was cool but when I am ramping down to company and they still want to charge $1250- $1400 is ridiculous.


I will check it out thanks