GST

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Top Accounting Mistakes of Ecommerce Businesses

The events of 2020 and 2021 have caused a significant push for businesses to pursue the E-Commerce route. It’s tough to sell your product if your retail location is forced to close. It’s also tough to sell your handcrafted items if the markets are closed… or if you find your customers are just opting to stay home. The World Wide Web is a fantastic way to reach your customers in each of the 168 hours in a week. You now have customers across Canada… or perhaps the world. Congratulations! Perhaps it’s time to take a step back to make sure you’re not falling into some common E-Commerce mistakes.

1. Failing to calculate the true costs of your product.

You’ve got an awesome product to sell online. Do you know the TRUE cost of selling that item? What is the total cost to get your product into your customers’ hands? Calculating this true cost is a critical step in determining your business viability any sort of profitability analysis. Are these business efforts worth it? Or would it make more money taking that part-time minimum wage job?

Consider the following:

  • Foreign exchange rates and potential for fluctuation.
  • Shipping costs: Any import costs plus the cost to ship your product to your customers.
  • Sales fees: Does your sales platform take a cut of your sales? Credit Card/merchant fees?
  • What about your time? You’ve started a crafting venture. Have you considered the value of your time in making these products?

2. Failing to report income

The Canada Revenue Agency requires you to report your earnings from your e-commerce ventures. It may be tempting to omit these online earnings. Did you know that CRA is able to request payout reports from various online e-commerce platforms? That’s right. CRA is able to obtain your earnings reports. Don’t be fooled into thinking that CRA is only concerned with the “big fish” business owners out there. The fact is that the little guys are more likely to simply pay their tax assessments… so are perfectly content in pursuing small business as well. You’re far better off to report the earnings and related expenses from the start and don’t attract their attention.

3. Failing to register for GST/HST and PST

Put very simply, if you’ve got annual sales of goods and services in Canada of $30,000 or more, you should be registering for GST. This means you’ll need to charge sales taxes to your customers and remit them to the related government body.

Do you need to register for PST in the various provinces?

You’ve got customers in British Columbia? Saskatchewan? Manitoba? Quebec? Each province is different. Call me lazy (or considerate of your time), but I think the best advice I can offer here is to research each province based on your situation. Some provinces have fairly simple and straightforward guidelines… but others have very specific rules. Some PST publications read as though you have to register for PST… unless you happen to sell purple widgets to lefthanded people.

Check out the links to these publications:

As a final check of your understanding, go ahead and call the 1-800 numbers to the provinces. Talk to someone from the related sales tax department to gain more comfort to your responsibilities to their province.

Authors note: unlike the CRA helpline, the provincial bodies tend to provide great advice and service.

4. Failing to charge GST/HST and PST properly

Not charging sales taxes properly is an extremely common mistake in E-Commerce. It’s critical that your sales platform/website is set up correctly to navigate this. If you’ve got customers across Canada and the United States, do you fully understand who has to pay sales taxes and at what rate?

GST/HST- if you are registered for GST/HST, you must charge it based on the ship-to address.

  • Not registered for GST or PST? DO NOT CHARGE IT. This is considered fraudulent.
  • Customer in Ontario? Charge 13% HST
  • Customer in Alberta? Charge 5% GST
  • Customer in New Brunswick? Charge 15% HST
  • Customers in the United States? Do not charge GST/HST

A very common mistake for businesses in Alberta is to simply charge the 5% GST to everyone. It’s a painful realization when CRA reviews their invoices to see that they should have charged a customer 15% and suddenly their profits disappear by way of their GST/HST filing.

5. Failing to enlist a professional accountant tax filings

An experienced, qualified professional accountant can assist you with your various filings, tax and sales tax obligations.

  • What expenses can you reasonably deduct?
  • When should you be registering for sales taxes?
  • How do you file sales taxes?
  • When should you consider incorporating your business?

If you don’t yet have a trusted accountant, we’re happy to help!

 

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Are you personally liable for your business debts?

When Bob’s Trucking Inc. started experiencing cash flow problems, Bob found his company was unable to pay all of its bills. He decided to use the money the company did have to pay for fuel and employees to continue operations because without fuel in the trucks or employees to drive the trucks, there was no business. At this point, he stopped paying the company’s GST and source deductions to CRA. He thought that if the trucking company ended up going bankrupt, the business debt to CRA would be taken care of through bankruptcy…WRONG!

Am I personally responsible for my business debts to Canada Revenue Agency?

When a business collects GST from customers or withholds source deductions from employees, it is acting as an agent on behalf of CRA. The company now has an obligation to remit these amounts collected to CRA. If Bob’s Trucking cannot meet this obligation in full, CRA will start arranging payment plans with the company. If this is still unsuccessful, CRA will pursue legal action against Bob’s Trucking Inc. to collect these amounts.

If CRA is still unsuccessful in collecting from the company, they can and they will go after the director of the company to try to collect these amounts. Here is where Bob’s personal bank accounts and assets are now at risk!

It is a slightly different story when Bob’s Trucking Inc. owes corporate income taxes to CRA. Since these amounts have not been collected by a third party on behalf of CRA, the company is not acting as an agent. The same collection process will be followed by CRA to try to collect these amounts from the company. But, if that is unsuccessful, Bob’s personal assets may or may not be at risk.

If Bob’s Trucking Inc. paid Bob dividends, then CRA can go after Bob personally for corporate income taxes owing up to the amount of the dividends he received. The logic behind this is if the company did not have sufficient money to meet its corporate tax obligations, how did it have sufficient money to pay dividends?

No business owner wants to find themselves getting behind with filing or payments with CRA.

When this does happen, most owners put their heads in the sand and try to avoid CRA’s phone calls and correspondence. This is a big mistake! CRA is willing to work with businesses to arrange payment plans to avoid pursuing legal action. But you MUST communicate with CRA.

This is one of the reasons it is important to have a professional accountant on your team. It is important to be proactive as a business owner so you do not find yourself in hot water with CRA. At Richardson Miller LLP, we have decades of experience working with business owners and corresponding with CRA.

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How to avoid the Crash and Burn

You are officially caught on CRA’s radar…

  • CRA is auditing or reviewing your information
  • Your filings have been arbitrarily re-assessed
  • The collections department is harassing you

No matter what the reason, dealing with the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) can be extremely stressful.

Here are some tips to help ease that CRA audit pain.

What are your responsibilities?

By law, you have to keep adequate books and records to determine your tax obligations and your entitlements. Generally, books and records must be kept for a minimum of six years.

If you use a computer for your accounting records, you must keep your books and records in an electronically readable format, even if you also keep them on paper. Using the services of a tax professional does not relieve you of your responsibilities.

For an audit, you must make available to the auditor all of your relevant records (both paper and electronic) and supporting documents, and provide complete and timely explanations to the auditor’s questions. Failure to provide required books and records is an offence under the law.

Source: canada.ca

1. Do NOT Ignore them.

The problem will not go away. Keep the lines of communication open. Return phone calls even if the only thing you have to say is “I’m working on it”.

2. Deal with any requests or incorrect assessments ASAP as they are often very time-sensitive.

If you ignore requests and CRA re-assesses you, it can take several months to correct AND if you ignore them long enough, the problem may become unfixable.

CRA Audit Client Examples

a. I had a trucking company referred to me. He was behind on GST filings and CRA Factually assessed him. The client had opted to bury his head in the sand. The returns became statute-barred and CRA refused to reassess them. I luckily found a reasonable auditor to re-open the files and managed to save my (very happy) client $80,000.

CRA Factually assessed – If you don’t file your GST file on time, the CRA can arbitrarily access you and send you a bill.

b. In another case, (again, before he was my client) an automotive mechanic shop company underwent a payroll audit. The business owner and (non-CPA) accountant at the time didn’t respond properly to queries. CRA incorrectly assessed over $100,000 owing in source deductions. They were referred to me. It took over a year of fighting with CRA to have them amend their assessment to the correct balance owing of only $4,000. In the meantime, their corporate bank accounts were seized. Again, if it would have been dealt with properly in the first place, it would have never been an issue.

3. Enlist your Chartered Professional Accountant in dealing with CRA.

Generally, I’m the one who responds to my client’s CRA queries. If the client is preparing the response, I review it before it is sent in. In the case of an on-site audit, I prefer to gather the records and host the auditor in my own boardroom. This eliminates any intimidation factor.

Quite often, the accountant will know exactly what the auditor is looking for and be able to provide the facts and only the facts to get the issue resolved as efficiently as possible. The last thing you want is a simple review request for payroll to turn into a GST audit, personal benefit assessments, disallowed expenses… the list goes on.

Sometimes just a slight change in terminology can drastically change the audit outcome.

I had a trucking company client go through a review to determine whether a subcontracted driver was an employee. If the contractor was determined to be an employee, my client would have been liable for over $20K in payroll taxes. My client kept referring to the contractor in employee terms even though the nature of the arrangement was leaning toward the contractor. Had I not been able to pre-screen and rephrase his responses to the appropriate terminology, the client would have ended up with a nasty bill.

4. CRA isn’t always right.

I know…it’s shocking indeed. You want someone in your corner who understands taxes to be able to argue on your behalf.

I had a client undergo a GST audit. The auditor (who appeared somewhat inexperienced) proposed an assessment of over $20,000 owing. Upon review of his supporting paperwork, I successfully argued the GST owing down to less than $2,000.

Do you need help in dealing with a CRA issue? We’re happy to help!

 

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GST Quick Method

GST QUICK METHOD

If your business is operating at revenue of $400,000 or less, you need to stop what you are doing and read this!

Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) offers an elective GST filing method for small businesses who have less than $400,000 in annual revenues. It is called the Quick Method and, in my opinion, it is a highly under-utilized election.

Who should use the Quick Method?

  • Other than a few industry specific exceptions, most businesses with less than $400,000 can use this election
  • Businesses with the majority of their expenses not being subject to GST would want to utilize this method. For example, if your largest expense is payroll you would definitely want to consider this.

How does the Quick Method work?

Under this method you would still charge the applicable rate of GST/HST on your sales, but this is not the same as the amount of GST you end up remitting up to CRA. What you end up remitting is based on the quick method remittance rates which are less than the applicable rates of GST/HST you charged.

Yes, that is correct, you collect more GST from your clients than you send to CRA. You do not get to claim any GST paid under this method though because the part of the GST you collected but got to keep accounts for the ITCs you would have otherwise claimed. The intention behind this election is to streamline the GST process for small businesses, but it can end up saving your business money! Who doesn’t want to save some money?

If the majority of your expenses are not subject to GST anyways, you are going to end up ahead under the Quick Method. You can find all the specifics on CRA’s website but I’ll go through a quick example below.

A practical example

It may seem a little confusing and it does require a little bit of number crunching so I will just sum it up a little.

Let’s look at Joe’s Contracting Ltd. Joe owns this business and he provides handyman services to his customers. He has very little costs associated with supplies as the majority of the jobs require only labour so he has one employee that helps him out. His business is based in Alberta and he earns exactly $400,000 in revenue a year.

Under the regular method of GST, Joe would collect GST of $20,000 from his clients and send the whole $20,000 up to CRA.

Under the quick method, Joe would still collect GST of $20,000 from his clients, but the cheque he sends off to CRA is only $15,120.

If you can choose to send CRA $20,000 or $15,120 which one are you choosing? I would think Joe would prefer sending the smaller cheque as well.

And has an additional bonus – this savings will continue to happen every single year when he files his GST return as long as he continues to meet the criteria.

The bottom line

If you think you qualify for the Quick method but have never heard of it before, you may very well be sending too much money to CRA. Reach out to us to discuss.

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Covid Thoughts

  1. Jazz Hands.

    That’s right. No auto-correct here—I meant it. With many cities implementing mandatory masks in public, we are missing out on a significant portion of our non-verbal communication options. Many of us can admit to over exaggerating our squinty eyes in attempts to convey that we are in fact smiling. Since Covid-19 is apparently here for the long haul, perhaps we need to consider implementing a universal sign that we are smiling without purposefully deepening our crows-feet (which, going forward, will likely be known as smiling mask wrinkles).

  2. Extended Deadlines.

    I recently visited my dental hygienist for the first time since lock down hit. After my teeth cleaning, I re-booked the appointment for six months later. In six months, it’ll be the end of March 2021! This realization was a bit of a smack in the face. In six short months, we’ll be doing our personal taxes all over again! This point is specifically for the procrastinators out there. Be aware that it’s almost time to do your 2020 personal taxes… even though you JUST finished your 2019 taxes. Perhaps you completed them earlier but JUST paid them. That next tax bill isn’t very far away. For many individuals (corporate filers included), the deadline extension has skewed the sense of urgency/timing/responsibility. Don’t procrastinate. Get ‘er done. Be on time. Missing deadlines may result in penalties, interest, missed incentive opportunities and delayed family tax credits.

  3. Covid-19 Incentives.

    Back in March and April, many folks got caught up in the government incentives and handouts. I’d encourage everyone to re-visit the CRA website to double check those programs. Over the last few months, the criteria has evolved and the website has been updated continuously. Did you actually qualify for that incentive? Perhaps you first thought you didn’t qualify but now you do. If you didn’t actually qualify but have received money, there are options to repay that money (via My Account and My Business Account on CRA online). Rest assured that CRA will be reviewing all who have received incentives to ensure eligibility.

  4. Creativity

    I’m impressed with the resiliency of entrepreneurs in Alberta. So many businesses have taken this setback and have quickly revised processes/systems and products/services to survive and or thrive. Thankfully this pandemic has hit when we have the technology to work from home. Could you imagine if this happened in 1985? Check out my article on how home offices impact your tax return. On the other hand, there are many businesses that have become victims of the lockdowns. This is truly heartbreaking. If you fall into this category, do continue to talk to your professional accountant to determine your filing responsibilities and opportunities to claim any losses.

If you need advice on COVID-19 issues with your business, please reach out! We’re happy to help. Contact us today.

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