Your first 90 days incorporated: the setup that prevents the mess

Five things need doing in your first 90 days, and none of them is a tax return. Get the corporation its own business number, with only the CRA accounts it needs opened against it. Open a corporate bank account before the first client payment arrives. Settle the GST/HST question, which stays a choice only until revenue crosses a threshold measured on a rolling basis. Pick a fiscal year-end deliberately, because you get one clean shot at it. Then name every transaction between you and the corporation on the day it happens, instead of reconstructing it eleven months later.

Everything else can wait, and most of it should — the salary-or-dividend mix, the payroll account, the tax bill. What owners pay to have cleaned up in year two is almost never a bad decision. It is a decision nobody wrote down.

The business number is the spine, and the accounts hang off it

Your corporation gets one business number, a nine-digit identifier belonging to the company rather than to you. Every CRA account it holds is that number plus a two-letter program code, which is why they all look alike on a notice.

• Corporate income tax (RC), where the T2 — the corporation’s income tax return — is filed and its tax is paid. Every corporation has one.
• GST/HST (RT), opened when you register, whether registration was required or chosen.
• Payroll (RP), opened when the corporation first pays salary or a taxable benefit to anyone, including you.
• Information returns (RZ), for slips such as the T5, which reports dividends, or the T5018 for payments to construction subcontractors.

Open only what the corporation needs now. An open program account generally carries a filing expectation whether or not anything happened inside it, so a payroll account opened in September for a salary first paid in March buys six months of empty returns.

One filing here is not a CRA matter: the annual return your incorporating jurisdiction wants keeps the company in good standing and is unrelated to the T2. Owners conflate the two and find out when the company has been struck.

Open the corporate bank account before the first invoice is paid

Revenue that lands in your personal account is still the corporation’s revenue. It does not stop being taxable there; it becomes an entry someone has to untangle, and the untangling runs through the shareholder-loan account — the running tab between you and the company, which carries a repayment rule with teeth.

Money you spent personally before the account existed is not lost. Incorporation fees, the laptop, the first year of software: record each as an amount the corporation owes you, keep the receipts, and repay yourself later without tax, because that is your own money coming home rather than income. It is the friendliest use the shareholder-loan account has, and it works only where the receipts do.

Get a separate card while you are there — not for tidiness, for evidence. A card that buys both groceries and client dinners produces a year-end where somebody bills you to read your own statements.

The GST/HST decision is a decision, not an inevitability

Registration becomes mandatory once the corporation’s taxable revenue passes a small-supplier threshold the CRA sets, measured on a rolling basis rather than against your fiscal year, so the crossing rarely lands tidily at a year-end. Below it, registering is optional. Registration also does not travel: if you were registered as a sole proprietor, the corporation is a different person to the CRA and generally needs its own number.

Registering early has a shape rather than a verdict. From the day you register you charge the tax on taxable supplies, file every reporting period on the dates in our deadlines table, and the GST/HST on your own costs becomes recoverable as input tax credits. Registered business clients recover what you charge them; consumers absorb it as a price increase. Once registered, a further election — the quick method — changes what you remit without changing what you charge.

Choose the year-end while you still have the choice

A corporation’s fiscal year is not automatically the calendar year. You choose it, in practice by the year-end date on the first T2, and the first period runs from incorporation to whatever you pick. It can be short. It cannot be stretched past a maximum length the Act sets. Changing it afterwards generally requires the CRA’s permission, which is what makes this a 90-day question rather than a year-three one.

A worked example: a consultant who incorporates September 1

Illustrative, round numbers. A consultant incorporates September 1, 2026, choosing between an August 31 year-end and a December 31 one.

Take August 31. The first period runs a near-full year, September 1, 2026 to August 31, 2027. The first T2 is due six months after that year-end — the end of February 2028, eighteen months after incorporation. The tax is due sooner: generally two months after year-end, three for many Canadian-controlled private corporations that claimed the small-business deduction, so end of October or end of November 2027. Federal tax on active business income runs at 9% on the first C$500,000 for an eligible CCPC in 2026, with a provincial rate on top.

Take December 31 instead. The first period is four months. A full set of filings arrives on a third of a year of trading: the T2 due June 30, 2027, the balance at the end of February or March 2027. In exchange the corporate year matches the calendar year that payroll (T4) and dividend (T5) slips already run on, and the one your personal return runs on.

Three things follow either way. Slips are unaffected. They report the calendar year and are due the last day of February whatever your year-end, so August means running two calendars permanently. Corporate instalments generally do not arise in a first year, because they are calculated off tax payable in the current and prior years and there is no prior year, so the whole first bill lands at once. And the shareholder-loan clock runs from the year-end: a C$20,000 draw taken in September 2026 falls in the period ending August 31, 2027 and is repayable by August 31, 2028 — under the December year-end it falls in the stub and is due by December 31, 2027.

Neither is right. August defers the first tax bill and gives twelve months of trading before anyone computes anything. December costs a return early and buys a single calendar.

The records habit is worth more than the software

Every dollar moving between you and the corporation gets a name on the day it moves: salary, dividend, reimbursement, repayment of what the company owes you, or a draw that adds to what you owe it. Those five are not interchangeable, they carry different filings, and what fails is deciding in June which one a March transfer was. Money taken before the compensation decision is made is a draw against the shareholder-loan account until it is formally something else, and the one-year repayment rule applies to it.

The deductions everyone asks about first work the same way. Home-office costs are claimed as a proportion of the space and its use, vehicle costs as a proportion of business kilometres to total. No percentage appears here because both are computed from your facts, and both stand or fall on a record kept as you go. The log starts in month one.

What does not need doing yet

• A payroll account, until the corporation pays someone. It goes with the first salary or taxable benefit, not with the incorporation, and once it exists source deductions are remitted on a schedule set by the size of the payroll.
• The compensation decision. Salary and dividends are re-decided every year against numbers you will not have until the year has some shape. Read how the comparison runs now; decide near year-end.
• Personal instalments. The CRA generally asks for them once your net tax owing tops C$3,000 (C$1,800 for Quebec residents) in the current year and in either of the two before it, so reminders usually start the year after the first real income comes out. Setting money aside starts immediately.
• The vehicle. Buying a car through the corporation does not create a deduction; it creates capital cost allowance claimed over years, and a vehicle meeting the tax definition of a passenger vehicle lands in Class 10.1, where the cost you can depreciate is capped at C$39,000 before tax for 2026 acquisitions, C$38,000 for 2025. Buy versus lease has the mechanics.

What Cadence does

We open the CRA accounts the corporation needs and leave the rest closed, set the year-end against your first-year cash flow and your personal calendar rather than by default, and register for GST/HST when the mechanism says to. From your year-end we build the filing calendar and then track it, so the first balance-due date is not a surprise arriving ahead of the return that explains it. The shareholder-loan account is opened properly in month one, which is the difference between a clean first T2 and a reconstruction. First-year corporations are most of what consultants and agency owners bring us; the fit and fee estimate starts it.