Contractor accountant in Maple Ridge

The PST question is answered by the contract, not the invoice

British Columbia treats a contractor who supplies and installs materials into real property as the end user of those materials. In plain terms: on a typical renovation or build contract you pay PST when you buy the materials and it sits inside your price as a cost, rather than being charged on to the homeowner as a separate line. Supply-only arrangements are treated differently, and so are some contracts where the customer supplies the materials. What decides the treatment is how the agreement is written, which means the decision has to be made when the quote goes out. Discovering at year-end that a contract was structured one way and priced the other is not a bookkeeping correction — the money is already gone.

A subcontractor’s clearance letter is your liability, not theirs

A hiring contractor in British Columbia can be assessed for an uninsured subcontractor’s WorkSafeBC premiums. The exposure does not appear at the time; it appears months after the job closed, when the assessment arrives and the sub is no longer reachable. The defence is procedural and cheap: make a current clearance letter a condition of final payment on every job, for every sub, and file it with the invoice. A trades business that does this consistently has nothing to reconstruct later. One that does it occasionally has an unquantified liability sitting in its history that no set of books will reveal.

Vehicles, the log, and the claim that survives a review

Almost every Maple Ridge trades business runs at least one truck, and the vehicle claim is one of the most frequently reviewed items on a small corporate file. The deductible portion turns on business-versus-personal use, and the evidence for that split is a log — dates, destinations, purpose and kilometres. A contractor working across Albion, Silver Valley, Whonnock and out to Mission accumulates that mileage legitimately, but a claim asserted without records is a claim that gets reduced. Whether the truck is owned or leased changes what is deducted and how; it does not change the need for the log.

One client is a structural risk, not just a commercial one

A trades corporation with essentially one customer, using that customer’s tools and direction and carrying little risk of loss, can be characterised by the CRA as a personal services business. The consequence is severe: the small business deduction is denied and most ordinary expense deductions are disallowed, which turns a comfortable arrangement into a very expensive one retroactively. This is a live issue for incorporated tradespeople who have effectively become a single builder’s crew. The factors that matter — control, ownership of tools, ability to subcontract, chance of profit or loss — are the same ones that decide whether a worker is an employee or a contractor, and they are worth reviewing honestly rather than optimistically.

The Maple Ridge work mix, and what it implies

Maple Ridge trades skew toward residential: custom builds and additions on the Silver Valley and Albion slopes, acreage work east of town, renovation and finishing across the older neighbourhoods near the river, and site services for all of it. That mix produces contracts with homeowners rather than general contractors, which changes who bears the sales tax question, how deposits arrive, and how disputes get resolved. It also produces genuinely seasonal revenue, so instalment obligations calculated on a strong year land in a quarter when the next season has not started paying yet. Planning those against the actual draw schedule rather than a flat formula is the difference between a manageable spring and a scramble. Construction accounting in BC covers the reporting side in more detail.

How the engagement runs from Abbotsford

EverStone is a sole practitioner firm operating from one office, at 32615 South Fraser Way in Abbotsford. There is no Maple Ridge office, no branch and nobody stationed locally. The engagement runs by video call, e-signature and secure document exchange, which suits a business whose day is spent on site rather than at a desk: documents go up from a phone, questions get answered without a trip across the river, and the CPA who prepares the return is the one who answers when you call. The BC tax facts tables set out the provincial rates and thresholds behind all of it.

The single figure that most often makes a trades year end right or wrong is work finished but not yet invoiced. See financial statements for Maple Ridge trades corporations for how that and customer deposits are handled.

Where the business has outgrown what one person can hold in their head, fractional CFO support for growing Maple Ridge trades businesses covers margin by crew, the hiring arithmetic and overhead recovery.