Tax & Accounting

The classic year end where we prepare your financial statements for your corporation, and as part of our work we’ll clean up any issues in your books and records. Very often a skipped step by many accountants is that this is a great opportunity to do some planning between your business and your family personally. Perhaps you have anticipated changes in your business that we should talk about and prepare your year end in accordance to those anticipated changes. For instance:

1. Are you selling the business, some pre-emptive planning is required before you go through with the transaction.
2. Is there a change in family status, more kids? or a divorce? Family is tied to your business and your year end is a good opportunity to address.
3. What’s the best way to take income from your company?

We talk to our clients all the time about these issues and it’s not just at year end, by the time we do your year end financial statements we would have done all the pre-planning.

Professionals are a unique group of individuals. We have corporations and sometimes we don’t. Our corporations are also very uniquely different than a normal corporation, it is tied to the profession and the individual providing professional services. As such the types of tax strategies we can deploy in our corporations are also uniquely different from what other corporations can do.

Often the discussion we have with our professionals is a succession planning with their practice, did you know there is significant value in your practice, do you know how much it’s worth? Another common discussion is bench-marking their practice with other professionals and seeing where they can improve in their business. Perhaps you’re just starting your practice and want to know how to obtain financing for the purchase of an existing practice or how to structure your purchase properly, that’s another common discussion we have with our professionals.

As an accountant and a professional services practice we’re just as in tune with your needs as we have for ourselves.

We’ve worked with many different franchises in different types of operations. Some of our clients are invested in several franchises and some of our clients are single location operations. Here are some of the types of franchises we’ve worked with:

• Financial planning and investment services
• Eldercare health providers
• Frozen yogurts
• Tutoring and extra-school activity services
• Fast food international brand franchises
• Retail mall location franchises
• Coffee & Confections restaurants
• Distribution & Network marketing franchises

There are so many different types of franchises and each one is uniquely different from the last. If you own multiple franchises there is significant tax planning that needs to be done to optimize both your business risks and tax strategies. If you own one franchise then you’re going to need how to best structure the one location in a way that suits your family’s taxes and your business operations. Bench-marking the performance of your franchise is something we do for our franchise clients. We have franchise clients in both Victoria and Calgary which makes it even more interesting to compare across provinces.

Consulting & Engineering firms often have multiple owners and multiple corporations. If you don’t then we definitely need to talk about how to best structure your business.

Your investment strategy has you invested in stocks, bonds, GIC’s, mutual funds, real estate etc. inside your company. Did you know that each type of investment has a different taxation applied to it? Did you know that each transaction you do whether you sell, purchase, or add to the investment has a different taxation applied as well? Even more interesting is that your investments can have a different taxation applied on the type of income it generates and how it is paid to you optimally.

We can advise you on:

• Optimal approach to paying out your investment income
• Tax optimization on the type of investments you participate in
• Planning in conjunction with your estate, will, and family
• Analysis of your private or exotic investment and its true returns and tax impact

We’ve had an abundance of experience working directly with CRA and their auditors. It’s very intimidating to conduct the audit yourself, not to mention you might create new problems for yourself where there wasn’t a problem. Our approach has had a very successful track record and this is what we do for you:

• Understand what is needed & not needed by the CRA
• Compile the information for you in an organized manner understandable by the CRA
• Compile a complete report and package for CRA submission
• We can even have the CRA agent come to our office instead of yours
• Follow up on the result of your audit and what it means for your business

This professional service is priceless to your small business. It saves you time and money from handling the CRA audit yourself. From our experience going through our methodology also minimizes the amount of CRA adjustments they find in their work which in turn saves you money.

Buying or selling a business for a lot of people are a once in a lifetime thing or at a minimum not an everyday event. Our firm has helped many clients in their assessment of buying & selling businesses in construction, real estate, franchises, professional practices, manufacturing, etc.

Before you sign that purchase agreement you want to talk to an accountant, like us, who has read through many agreements of this nature. We can advise you on the optimal approach to how you conduct your transaction before you sign off.

Perhaps you’re interesting in knowing what the value of the company is worth, we can compile a report for you to help you understand what buyers and sellers are looking for.