What year one actually looks like

Months zero to one — onboarding

The engagement starts with a free consultation and ends its first month with everything in one place. You sign the engagement letter electronically, authorise EverStone as your representative with the CRA, and — if you are switching firms — the records request goes to your previous accountant directly, because collecting your own file from a former firm is an awkward job you should not have to do. What arrives gets checked, not filed away: prior returns, carry-forward balances, the shareholder loan position and the state of the books all get read in the first month, which is where earlier errors surface while they are still cheap to fix.

The first filing cycle — in dependency order

Filings depend on each other, so year one runs them in sequence rather than as isolated deadlines. The books come current first — caught up if they are behind, set onto a monthly rhythm if they were annual. GST periods file from those books on their assigned cycle.

The corporate year-end closes next: draft financial statements, the T2, and the remuneration decision — how much leaves the company this year, as salary or dividends — made with you before anything is filed, because it is the one decision that cannot be improved after the slips are issued. The slips follow by the end of February, and the personal returns land last, in spring, built from slips whose contents were planned rather than discovered.

What happens between filings

The space between deadlines is where a year-round engagement differs from a tax-season one. Questions get answered as they come up — asking is free all year, because the fee is fixed and there is no meter running. Deadline reminders arrive before each date that concerns you, not a generic calendar. The books close monthly, so mid-year questions get answered from current numbers instead of last year’s. And before the corporate year-end closes, there is a planning conversation while the decisions are still open: the remuneration mix, asset purchase timing against the CCA rules, instalments compared against how the year actually went.

What you will notice, and what you will not

You will notice the touchpoints: the onboarding calls, the draft review before each filing, the reminder before each deadline, the year-end planning conversation. You should not notice the machinery behind them — the reconciliations, the CRA correspondence monitoring, the notice-of-assessment checks after each filing that quietly confirm the CRA processed what was actually sent. A well-run engagement is mostly invisible; the visible parts are the decisions that need you.

Year two is year one, minus onboarding

The second year keeps the rhythm and drops the setup: no records transfer, no rebuild, the same CPA holding the same file. That continuity is the quiet compounding benefit — every year the answers to “why did this number move” get faster, because the person answering watched it move.

Before year one there is usually a decision or two still open — the decision guide works through the common ones.