Payroll services in Sherwood Park

Payroll for Sherwood Park employers is part of our monthly package, which starts from $300 a month with the bookkeeping and GST filings included. Forms handled: PD7A remittances, T4 and T4A slips, records of employment and WCB-Alberta returns.

What Alberta does not charge

Alberta levies no employer payroll health tax of the kind British Columbia, Ontario and Manitoba impose. For a Sherwood Park employer, the statutory cost of employing someone is CPP and EI on both the employee and employer side, plus workers’ compensation premiums. Nothing provincial is added to the wage bill.

For a business deciding where to base a growing crew, or one that already employs people in more than one province, that is a real recurring difference, not a rounding error. The figures are on the Alberta tax facts page.

Crews that grow and shrink with the plant schedule

Many Sherwood Park employers supply labour to the refineries and petrochemical plants in Strathcona County and the rest of the Industrial Heartland. Their headcount rises for a maintenance shutdown or a project and falls when it ends. That pattern creates payroll work most office businesses never see: new hires to set up quickly, overtime and premium rates to apply correctly, and a batch of terminations at the end.

Each departure needs a record of employment showing insurable hours and earnings by pay period. Employers with clean pay-period records produce them in an afternoon. Employers without them spend a week rebuilding the data while also managing the layoff. Final pay, vacation pay owing and the deadlines for both need to be right the first time. See final pay when employment ends.

General holiday pay: Alberta’s 4.2% formula

Alberta recognizes nine general holidays, with four further optional days an employer may choose to treat as general holidays. General holiday pay for a general employee is at least 4.2% of the wages, vacation pay and general holiday pay earned in the four weeks immediately before the holiday. The base is more than wages: it includes vacation pay and earlier holiday pay, so a holiday that follows closely after another is calculated on a slightly larger base.

This differs from the average-day’s-pay approach used in British Columbia and the divide-by-twenty formula used in Ontario. National payroll templates often get it wrong silently. For a crew on rotating shifts or working long hours through a shutdown, the four-week base can be large, and it has to be calculated rather than approximated. Optional holidays should be a written policy, not a decision made the week the day falls.

WCB-Alberta and subcontracted labour

Workers’ compensation is administered by WCB-Alberta, with premiums set by industry classification and charged on assessable earnings. Registration and reporting are separate from your CRA payroll account. Plant operators and general contractors commonly ask their contractors to show good standing before they start work, so an account that is current matters commercially as well as legally.

Businesses that pay individuals as contractors rather than employees should be careful. Classification turns on the real arrangement — who controls the work, who supplies the tools, who carries the risk — not the label on the contract. Getting it wrong means back source deductions, penalties and interest assessed against the payer. See employee versus contractor.

Remittances and year-end slips

Income tax, CPP and EI withheld are remitted on the schedule the CRA assigns to your payroll account, and late remittances carry penalties that apply even when the return is otherwise correct. Bonuses and retroactive increases have their own withholding method. T4 and T4A slips and summaries are filed by the last day of February. See the payroll remittance guide.

What the engagement covers

• Pay runs with Alberta tax tables applied to Alberta employees
• Income tax, CPP and EI withheld and remitted on your assigned CRA schedule
• General holiday pay on the Alberta 4.2% basis, including an optional-holiday policy
• Vacation pay accrued and tracked as a liability
• WCB-Alberta registration support and assessable earnings reporting
• Records of employment from pay-period records, including layoff batches
• T4 and T4A slips and summaries filed by the last day of February

Payroll is included in monthly bookkeeping, which starts from $300 a month; the fee is fixed in writing after we review your headcount and pay frequency. See the published fees.

Remote, and there is no Sherwood Park office

EverStone is a fully virtual firm. There is no Sherwood Park office to visit. Payroll travels well online because the inputs are hours and rates and the outputs are pay stubs, remittances and slips. Timesheets arrive by secure upload, questions are handled by email, and one accountant holds the file from the first remittance through to the February slips. The deduction calculator is there if you want to check a single cheque.