Payroll services in St. Albert

Payroll for St. Albert employers is part of our monthly package, which starts from $300 a month with the bookkeeping and GST filings included.

What a St. Albert payroll involves

Every pay run applies the federal and Alberta tax tables to each employee’s pay, withholds CPP and EI, and adds the employer’s share of both. The withholdings and the employer contributions are remitted to the CRA through your payroll (RP) account on the schedule the CRA assigns, which depends on your average monthly withholding: quarterly for the smallest employers, monthly for most small businesses, and more often for larger ones. Late remittances attract penalties that are steep relative to the amounts involved, and they are one of the easiest penalties to avoid. Payroll remittances and the RP account covers the schedules.

After the calendar year ends, T4 slips go to employees and the T4 summary to the CRA by the last day of February. Payments to contractors who are not employees may need T4A slips instead. The figures on the slips have to agree with what was remitted during the year; a mismatch produces a CRA letter in the spring.

What Alberta does not charge

Alberta levies no employer payroll health tax of the kind British Columbia, Ontario and Manitoba impose. For a St. Albert employer, the statutory cost of employing someone is CPP and EI on both sides, plus workers’ compensation premiums, with nothing provincial charged on the wage bill itself. The comparison is concrete: a BC employer with $2,000,000 of remuneration pays employer health tax at 1.95% on the whole amount, and the same payroll in Alberta attracts no equivalent charge. For a company in one of St. Albert’s business parks deciding where to place a growing team, that is a recurring line item, not a rounding difference.

General holiday pay: Alberta’s 4.2% formula

Alberta recognizes nine general holidays, and an employer may choose to treat four further optional days as general holidays too. 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 not just wages: it includes vacation pay and earlier general holiday pay, so a holiday that falls shortly after another one is calculated on a slightly larger base.

This is a different mechanism from the average day’s pay used in British Columbia and the divide-by-twenty formula used in Ontario, and it is one of the places a national payroll template quietly produces the wrong number. It matters most for the kind of staff St. Albert employers have: part-time retail and restaurant staff whose hours change week to week, and construction crews whose hours swing with the season. Whether the optional holidays apply should be a written policy, not a decision made in the week the day falls.

Vacation pay

Vacation pay accrues as employees earn wages and is a liability until it is paid or the time is taken. We track it by employee so the balance sheet shows what is owed, and so a departing employee’s final pay includes the right amount. Vacation pay rules for employers covers the general rules.

WCB-Alberta

Workers’ compensation in Alberta is administered by WCB-Alberta, with premiums set by industry classification and charged on assessable earnings. Registration and reporting are separate from your CRA accounts, but they draw on the same wage data, so the figures reported to WCB-Alberta should reconcile to the payroll ledger. Contractors should also confirm a subtrade’s WCB-Alberta standing before paying it, because an uncovered subtrade can become the hiring company’s problem.

Seasonal staff, layoffs and records of employment

A lot of St. Albert payrolls change size through the year. Landscapers, renovators and concrete and paving contractors hire in spring and lay off in late fall. Retailers add staff for the holiday season. Contractors working on industrial projects in Sturgeon County add crews when a job starts and release them when it ends. Each departure needs a record of employment with insurable hours and earnings by pay period, filed electronically within the required time. Employers with clean pay-period records produce a batch of ROEs in an afternoon; employers without them spend a week rebuilding them while also handling the layoff. Bonuses and retroactive increases have their own withholding method, so they are calculated separately rather than run through the ordinary tables.

What the engagement covers

• Pay runs with federal and Alberta tax tables applied
• Income tax, CPP and EI withheld and remitted on your 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, including seasonal layoff batches
• T4 and T4A slips and summaries filed by the last day of February

Fully online

EverStone is a fully virtual firm with no St. Albert office. Payroll travels well remotely because the inputs are timesheets and the outputs are pay stubs, remittances and slips. Hours come to us by email or upload, pay stubs go to employees electronically, and one accountant holds the file from the first remittance to the February slips. The payroll deduction calculator is there if you want to check a single cheque.

Who this suits, and who it does not

This is for a St. Albert employer with a handful to a few dozen staff: a trades company, a clinic or dental office, a retailer or restaurant, a distributor in Campbell or Riel. A large unionized workforce on shift-scheduling software needs a dedicated payroll platform, and we will say so in the first reply.