Areas of practice

Accounting & auditing, including real estate and legal trust audits

Compilation and review financial statements prepared for small to medium businesses — the statements your lender, your insurer, your buyer or your shareholders ask for. Work is planned around your year end, and the file is documented so that questions later in the year can be answered quickly.

Margaret also conducts real estate and legal trust audits. Trust work has no margin for guesswork: reconciliations must tie, supporting documents must be complete, and the reporting must stand up to review by the Law Society or the regulator.

Corporate and business taxes — e-file

T2 corporate income tax returns prepared and electronically filed, along with the schedules and working papers that support them. Because the bookkeeping is normally done here as well, the return is built from records that have already been reviewed rather than from whatever arrives in a shoebox.

• Corporate income tax returns (T2), prepared and e-filed
• GST/PST considerations handled as part of the bookkeeping cycle
• Year-end adjusting entries, depreciation and account reconciliations
• Support with CRA queries and review letters

Personal taxes — e-file

Personal T1 returns prepared and electronically filed, including the situations that make a return more than a single slip: rental property, investment income, self-employment, multiple employment income sources, and the federal and provincial credits that families are entitled to claim.

New to the process? The personal tax information checklist walks through what to gather, and the downloads page has the federal and provincial personal tax credit worksheet plus the TD1 federal and TD1 BC forms.

Monthly bookkeeping services

Monthly bookkeeping keeps your records current, your filings on time and your year end uneventful. You get financial information you can actually use during the year — how the month went, what is owed, and where the money is going — instead of a single annual surprise.

• Monthly or quarterly bookkeeping, whichever suits your volume
• Bank, credit card and loan reconciliations
• Accounts receivable and payable tracking
• Catch-up work for records that have fallen behind

Payroll service

Payroll calculations, source deductions, remittances and Records of Employment, kept on schedule. Payroll penalties are almost always avoidable, and they are almost always caused by a missed deadline rather than a mistake in the numbers.

For new hires, the TD1 federal and TD1 BC forms determine how much tax to withhold; both are available on the downloads page.

Set-up and training: QuickBooks, Simply and MYOB

Set-up and training in the accounting software you already use, or in the one that fits your business better. Training is practical and task-based: enter an invoice, reconcile the bank, run the report your lender wants. You leave able to keep your own books if you want to — and if you would rather not, we keep doing them.

Non-profit organizations

Societies and non-profit organizations have reporting duties to their board, their members and their funders. Marcus & Co. provides bookkeeping, financial reporting and filing support so that the board can answer questions about restricted funds, project spending and the year’s results with confidence.

Tax planning & financial consulting

Tax planning is a year-round activity, not a March one. Planning covers how you take money out of a corporation, when to buy or sell equipment, how instalments are calculated, and how family income is arranged — decisions that are much cheaper to make before the year closes than after.

The tax filing deadline calendar lists the dates around which most of these decisions need to be made.

Planning also covers the personal assets that show up in a tax file — a watch, a piece of jewellery, a collectible. Whether a client’s asset is a genuine piece or a replica changes the depreciation, the capital gains treatment and whether it is recorded as a personal or a business asset. We document the purchase price, the date and the intended use so the treatment stands up at review — a client’s Audemars Piguet replica and a genuine Audemars Piguet are treated quite differently.