# does any small business owners here do their own taxes?



## user (Sep 21, 2009)

Were you an accountant, or if not, how did you learn corporate accounting? Are there courses or free resources you'd recommend for learning accounting?


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## FrugalTrader (Oct 13, 2008)

Do you mean that you want to file your own corporate taxes year end? Or just manage your books throughout the year so that it's organized for year end? If it's the latter, there are software programs out there, like Quickbooks, that will do the trick.


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## Just a Guy (Mar 27, 2012)

Personally, I recommend you focus on your business and hire experts to handle the taxes. Too many people make the mistake of trying to save money by doing it themselves when it comes to things like accounting, marketing, etc. 

If you don't know what you are doing, it can take a lot of time away from you working on making money, plus it can cost you by making mistakes. Hire people who know what they are doing and focus on running your company would be my advice, but you still need to understand what the accountant is saying about your cash flow.


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## amack081 (Jun 23, 2015)

Just a Guy said:


> Personally, I recommend you focus on your business and hire experts to handle the taxes. Too many people make the mistake of trying to save money by doing it themselves when it comes to things like accounting, marketing, etc.
> 
> If you don't know what you are doing, it can take a lot of time away from you working on making money, plus it can cost you by making mistakes. Hire people who know what they are doing and focus on running your company would be my advice, but you still need to understand what the accountant is saying about your cash flow.


I completely agree with this statement.

I work in an accounting/audit/tax firm and from my experience, a lot of small business owners forgo seeing professional because of their fees to their detriment. For instance, this previous tax year, I worked on a file where the woman accurately calculated her taxes payable, however she didn't realize that she was eligible for the New Residential Rental Property Rebate. The rebate that she received more than covered our fees and her amount owing in tax.

Just to add to Just a Guy, there are many different types of specialty accountants/tax advisors out there. I recommend that you find the one that suits your needs. For instance, if you are having issues with HST, find an HST specialist. If you are having problems with US Tax reporting, find a US Tax specialist.


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## wendi1 (Oct 2, 2013)

I hire an accountant to do my business taxes. IMHO, the learning curve is steep, regulations change too frequently, and my time is better spent making the money to pay her.

I use Quickbooks for my business, and do my own data entry for expenses and income (this is easy, and my accountant showed me how to do it). She does the bank reconcilliations, and files the taxes.

Taxes are hard. I do ask lots of questions, read the forms before I sign them, and try to understand what she tells me.


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## Russ (Mar 15, 2010)

I think Wendi1 has it exactly right. 95% of accounting entries are really just a few routine, repetitive entries. Your accountant can teach you how to do these entries if you want to do them. Leave the other 5% and income tax to the pros. 

I also agree completely with Just A Guy and Amack081. In the time it would take you to be effective in complicated accounting entries and income tax, you could make more than the cost of the pro by doing what you are good at - that is, your core business activities.


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## kcowan (Jul 1, 2010)

Quickbooks is great. The only complexity is equipment depreciation and carrying forward the undepreciated value. Getting it set up is harder but once set up, maintaining it is a breeze. If you have it set up properly, income tax is also easy, and HST filings. I probably spend a week out of the year doing all these things.

Part of the secret is using the system to make payments so that there is no duplicate data entry.


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## VideoTaxJoe (Jun 24, 2015)

*Benefits of an Accountant*

I'm on the same page as most of the rest of the comments. Some of the other reasons why you should really hire an account to file your returns:

a) they give advice on how to pull money out of the company (how much, when, by dividend or bonus)
b) they can help you figure out the most tax advantageous employee benefits to give
c) can help dealing with the maze of using vehicles (own personally or in the company, rent or buy)
d) they can also give advice on how to involve family members in the company tax efficiently
e) they can help keep you in CRA's good books
f) As an owner of a tax news publisher, I can tell you that we probably review 5,000 pages of new tax information on a monthly basis. Things are always changing. You really need someone that can pull the gems out of all that crap to keep you on side, and aware of the beneficial possibilities.

I'm no longer in public accounting, but I can say, during my time in that field, saw incredible value on a daily basis. Like Just a Guy said, focus on what you know and don't waste your time on what you don't. Find the right accountant and move onwards and upwards!


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## kcowan (Jul 1, 2010)

VideoTaxJoe said:


> Find the right accountant and move onwards and upwards!


In our case, the accountant accepted our Quickbooks files and was able to produce the audit report for peanuts. A little more the first year and then pretty routine.


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## uptoolate (Oct 9, 2011)

I always felt that my accountant was the single most valuable employee I had. Peace of mind.... Priceless! And the actual price attached seemed quite small given that it included 6 personal tax returns as well.


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## agent99 (Sep 11, 2013)

For what it's worth, we ran two businesses. One a proprietorship and the other a professional practice. We did our own books. 

The profession was very simple to do. The retail proprietorship had a lot of entries and some complexities. 

I had a smattering of bookkeeping knowledge from course I had taken at high school and evening MBA type courses later in life. My wife took an evening accounting course offered at a local college. We had the texts from these courses as our "bibles". We also had an MBA student set up our initial books through a low cost program offered by a local university. Once in business, we used two different computer based programs for data entry. BPI initially and then MYOB, which I believe has since been bought by another company. We had clerical help to enter the daily transactions because there were a lot and in those days not computerized. My wife closed books on monthly basis and produced statements. Same at year end. CRA provides an outline of what they require for tax purposes. I also did my best to keep abreast of tax programs and how they applied to us. We didn't really use CRAs forms, but just submitted our own statements and there never was a problem in 27 years.

I don't suggest this is for everyone. But what I do suggest, is that any business owner fully understand their own company books and their tax submissions. Don't rely on someone else to do the understanding!


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## Synergy (Mar 18, 2013)

user said:


> Were you an accountant, or if not, how did you learn corporate accounting? Are there courses or free resources you'd recommend for learning accounting?


Learn as much as you can about accounting and be capable of doing the book keeping and returns yourself. However, I would still recommed that you hire a good accountant. They've saved me a lot of time and money over the years by providing me with valuable service and professional advice. I've also saved myself a lot of money over the years by picking up on mistakes made by a varity of accountants.


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## VideoTaxJoe (Jun 24, 2015)

Synergy said:


> Learn as much as you can about accounting and be capable of doing the book keeping and returns yourself. However, I would still recommed that you hire a good accountant.


Bang on.


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## Plugging Along (Jan 3, 2011)

We do our own bookkeeping from a day to day standpoint To save some money. This is just the basic bookkeeping. We have an accountant that does our taxes,and also is available to answer any questions through out the year. 

To fully disclose, I had an accounting degree, but never worked in accounting. I have my spouse do the book keeping (he is no business guy) so he would learn is. I would just check it at first. Then our accountant would do the final run through and ask us a whole bunch of questions to make sure sure we didn't miss anything. 

Our accountant is well worth her extremely high fees because she also does our personal taxes, then we can coordinated to make sure we are getting the maximum benefits and deductions between our corporation and personal taxes.


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## Azim Dahya & Co CGA (Jun 3, 2015)

If you are looking to save costs i would go with an accountant only for the compilation. For the bookkeeping if you have time you should learn how to use Quickbooks and do it yourself. 
Check this out for quickbooks training: http://advancedtax.ca/training/


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## ally_thomas (Jul 9, 2015)

I used to do it before when I was short on budget and I was a small IT startup in Toronto. But lately I realized that I better need to focus on my core work and I should outsource the accounting part to a professional accountant. So I got a professional who is specialized in tax service for startups.

http://www.shoichet.com/services/taxation-services/business-tax-services/


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## TaxGuy (Apr 7, 2009)

There is a subtle difference between accounting and bookkeeping. Bookkeeping is the recording of transactions into a bookkeeping system: Classifying transactions, filing and organizing source documents. 

Accounting is the process of preparing financial statements. For most corporations accountants compile financial statements such that the presentation is not false or misleading. It is important to be aware that printing financial statements from your bookkeeping is not what accountants do. Often we will correct errors and find adjustments that correctly report income.

Accountants are also deeply versed in tax and we can save you time and money from that knowledge.


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## andrewf (Mar 1, 2010)

My parents sold their active business and now have a holding company that is invested only in financial assets (stocks and bonds). They are still paying their accountant about $5k per year for taxes, etc. It seems pretty rich to me for what is now a very simple corporation. Any thoughts on this?


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