T4As: the slip everyone forgets until February

If your corporation paid someone who is not your employee for services in the course of business, that payment generally belongs on a T4A — the slip for fees and other amounts paid to a non-employee — filed with the CRA and given to the recipient by the last day of February for the calendar year just ended. The rule as written is broader than almost anyone applies it. The CRA has said for years that it will not assess a penalty for a missing fees-for-services amount while it reviews the requirement, which is an administrative practice rather than a repeal, and which is why two competent bookkeepers can look at the same supplier list and produce different numbers of slips.

Nothing in an ordinary month prompts the question. You pay an invoice, it gets coded to subcontractors or professional fees, and the matter closes — until the last week of February, when it reopens for a year of invoices at once with a deadline attached.

What the fees-for-services box actually asks for

The T4A is a catch-all slip. Pension or superannuation payments, lump sums, self-employed commissions, RESP and RDSP payments, research grants, death benefits — they all land on it, and none of them is why you are reading this. For an incorporated owner one box does the work: fees or other amounts for services, box 048.

Four things have to line up. You paid in the course of a business, so an owner who hires a tradesperson for their own kitchen is outside it entirely. The recipient was not your employee. What you bought was services rather than goods. And the amount cleared a reporting threshold the CRA sets — a low one, rarely the thing that saves you.

The slip runs on the calendar year in which you paid, not on your fiscal year-end. A corporation with a June 30 year-end still cuts its supplier ledger at December 31 for this purpose, which is one more reason an off-calendar year-end means running two calendars permanently. And the amount reported is generally the fee itself, net of GST/HST — the opposite convention from the T5018, which reports the gross that left the bank. Two returns, two treatments of the same invoice, and no warning on either form.

T4, T4A and T5018 run in different lanes

Those dates sit on the deadline table with your T2 and GST/HST returns. The T4 lane comes with a payroll account and a remittance schedule behind it; hiring your first employee covers what opens when you cross into it. Where construction is your main business activity, payments to subcontractors for construction services go on a T5018 instead, on a period you elect rather than the calendar year.

The T4A differs from the T5018 in a way that costs time: the recipient gets a copy. Your supplier will read it. If your number and their books disagree, you hear about it in March.

Which lane a payment belongs in follows from the working relationship, and the slip does not decide the relationship. Filing a T4A records that you treated someone as a contractor. It does not make them one, and the payer carries the exposure if the CRA disagrees.

The fuzzy zone is corporations, mixed invoices and borders

Three situations account for most of the disagreement, and honesty about them is more useful than a confident answer.

The first is the supplier who invoices through their own corporation. The requirement is written around amounts paid for services, and nothing in it obviously turns on the recipient’s legal form — yet the common practice among payers is to slip unincorporated suppliers and quietly skip incorporated ones. The gap between the text and the practice is real, and anyone who tells you it is settled is describing what they do, not what the rule says.

The second is the invoice that mixes goods and services. A sign company that fabricates a sign and installs it has sold you both. The cautious reading reports the whole invoice; the common practice reports the service portion where the invoice separates it and the whole thing where it does not. The construction return reports mixed invoices in full, which tells you the drafters knew the problem existed.

The third is the border. A non-resident performing services in Canada is a different regime altogether — tax withheld at source when you pay, and a different slip, the T4A-NR — while services performed entirely outside Canada by someone with no Canadian presence generally sit outside both. The withholding is the part that catches payers, because it comes out of a cheque you have already agreed to.

The rule says file; the CRA’s practice says something softer

The honest answer to “do I really have to” is: yes, and the CRA has been declining to punish the failure. Its stated position is that it will not assess a penalty for not reporting fees for services while the reporting requirement is under review. That position has been renewed year after year without ever becoming law, which means it can be withdrawn without a bill, a budget or a notice period.

Three things it does not do. It does not reach the other amounts on the slip — miss a lump sum or a research grant and the ordinary per-slip penalty applies. It does not touch the recipient’s obligation to report the income, and their return is where the CRA’s matching interest actually sits. And it does nothing at all about classification: a supplier who should have been on payroll is the same problem whether you slipped him or not, and the assessment there is both shares of CPP and EI, plus penalties and interest, over years you thought were closed.

There is a quieter reason to keep the list anyway. A missing slip does not by itself deny your deduction, but a payer who tracked which suppliers needed slips is a payer who has invoices, business numbers and legal names for all of them. The ones who skip the exercise find out, when a letter asks for the receipts behind one expense line, that four suppliers are recorded as a first name and an e-transfer.

A worked example: six invoices and one February

Illustrative, round numbers, December 31 year-end. A consulting corporation paid six suppliers on invoice during 2026. In the last week of February the list has to be sorted:

• A bookkeeper, sole proprietor, C$9,000 across twelve monthly invoices. Services, unincorporated, well over the threshold — a slip.
• A designer, C$4,200 for one project. Same answer.
• A developer working through his own corporation, C$72,000 for the year. The corporate question, unsettled — and he worked the corporation’s hours on the corporation’s laptop with no other clients, which makes this a classification file before it is a slip file.
• A laptop and two monitors, C$3,400. Goods, no service component, out.
• A copywriter resident in the United States, C$6,000, all of it written in Ohio. Out of this lane; the border rules answer it.
• A sign company, C$2,000, fabricated and installed. The invoice shows C$1,400 of materials and C$600 of labour, which is the split you would report if you report a split at all.

Two clean slips, one judgment call, one out, one out of lane, one that depends on how cautiously you read a mixed invoice. Preparing the two clean ones is an afternoon. The developer, if the CRA ever asks, is considerably more than that, and the slip is not the reason.

Above a small number of slips, information returns must be filed electronically, and the late-filing penalty is charged per slip — a modest number attached to a date nobody has on a calendar.

What Cadence does

We build the T4A list through the year instead of in the last week of February — suppliers flagged as services when the invoice is paid, business numbers and legal names collected at engagement, goods-only vendors and non-residents kept out of it. T4 and T4A preparation runs on the same calendar as your remittances and GST/HST returns; that calendar is part of the year-round packages, and on the annual-returns package slip work is an add-on scoped at the estimate. Where a supplier’s invoice reads more like a payroll record than a purchase — your hours, your equipment, no other clients — we say so in November, when the answer can still change something. Consultants and agencies hit this hardest, because their supplier list is long and mostly people.