The owner-manager year-end checklist

Half of a year-end checklist has an invisible deadline. The compensation you declared, the equipment that was actually running, the balance in your shareholder-loan account, the count on the shelf — those are facts about the last day of your fiscal year, settled once the day passes. The other half has a window afterwards: the accrued bonus, the slips at the end of February, the tax balance at two or three months, the return at six. Most of what gets called a year-end scramble is the first list being attempted in the second list’s time.

Which is why the useful version happens in the quarter before year-end, while the first list is still decisions, not history. None of it is heroic. It is a calendar.

The compensation mix belongs to a year before it belongs to a return

Salary and dividends both have to be put into a year while the year is still open. A dividend exists because the directors declared it: a resolution dated inside the fiscal year lands the payment in that year, one dated in February lands it in the next. Salary is a deduction of the year the corporation incurred it, and outside a properly accrued bonus, remuneration nobody actually paid is a weak deduction.

The salary-or-dividend comparison is not itself a year-end job: it turns on RRSP room, CPP and your personal bracket. Executing it is. A second calendar runs underneath. T4 and T5 slips follow the calendar year the pay or the dividend fell in, not your fiscal year — the seam owners with a June year-end find late.

A capital purchase counts when it’s working, not when it’s invoiced

Capital cost allowance — CCA, the tax system’s version of depreciation — attaches to the year an asset becomes available for use. Not ordered, not paid for, not delivered. Working. A machine that arrives December 28 and sits crated until January is a next-year deduction, and no invoice date fixes that.

2026 raises the stakes on that date. Bill C-15, law on March 26, 2026, reinstated the accelerated investment incentive — a larger first-year deduction in place of the usual half-year haircut — and added immediate expensing for a short list of productivity assets: computers · data-network infrastructure · patents. Those come off in full in the year they go into service, which is the largest of this year’s changes and puts real money on a December install versus a January one.

Two cautions. A deduction is worth your tax rate while the asset costs a hundred cents on the dollar, so a December purchase only makes sense if you were buying anyway; and pulling a deduction forward borrows it rather than creating it. If the purchase is a vehicle, Class 10.1 arrives first: the 2026 ceiling on a passenger vehicle is C$39,000 before tax, and above it the money is not deductible on either route.

The shareholder-loan balance is photographed at year-end

Your shareholder-loan balance on the last day of the fiscal year is the number that starts a clock. Money you took out that wasn’t salary, wasn’t a declared dividend and wasn’t reimbursement generally has to be repaid within one year after the end of the fiscal year you took it in, or the CRA generally includes the principal in your income for that year. The full rule, and the exceptions, are here.

The window makes this look like a post-year-end item. It isn’t, quite. The cheapest cure is almost always declaring the compensation you were already taking — and that is a midnight item. Leave the balance until the following autumn and the cheap route has closed behind you.

Family salaries have to be earned before they can be paid

Pay a spouse or an adult child for work they actually did, at a rate you would pay a stranger for it, and record it the way you would for anyone else on the payroll: hours, a rate, source deductions, a T4. A single cheque in late December covering a year of help nobody wrote down is the version that gets adjusted, and the tax on split income sits behind it testing whether the recipient contributes at all.

Inventory is a fact you can only observe once

Nobody reconstructs a December 31 shelf in June; they estimate it, the estimate becomes cost of goods sold, and cost of goods sold is most of the gross margin the return reports. So the count is a real deadline for e-commerce and retail owners, restaurants and distributors, and a non-event for a consultancy. The valuation method the tax rules allow has to stay the same year to year, so settle it once.

What still has a window after the date

The accrued bonus is the compensation exception. Remuneration accrued in the fiscal year and paid within a set number of days after year-end is generally still deductible in that year; past the count, the deduction moves to the year of payment. The count is short, and it is not a rule of thumb.

The payment date arriving before the filing date is what catches first-time filers. Your own calendar runs separately, on the calendar year: the personal return, instalments on the 15th of March, June, September and December, and an RRSP contribution deadline early in the following year. The deadline table has the rest.

The same year, decided in November and decided in June

Illustrative, round numbers, December 31 year-end. Nadia’s design corporation earns C$240,000 of active business income in 2026 before anything reaches her. She has drawn C$70,000 through the year with nothing declared, so it sits in the shareholder-loan account. She wants C$18,000 of workstations, deliverable mid-December or the second week of January.

Decided in November, the directors declare a mix against the C$70,000 — some salary, the balance a dividend — and the loan account clears before it ever reaches a balance sheet. The workstations arrive December 12 and are set up that week, so the C$18,000 comes off 2026 in full. At the 9% federal rate on active business income inside the first C$500,000, that is C$1,620 of federal tax deferred by a year, with her province’s rate on top. The T4 and the T5 go out by the end of February.

Decided in June, while the T2 is being prepared, the C$70,000 sits on the December 31 balance sheet as owing from her. She has until the end of fiscal 2027 to repay it, so nothing has gone wrong yet — but the salary route now means a late slip and late remittances, narrowing the real choice to cash or a dividend declared in 2027, on a personal return she hasn’t planned for. The workstations arrived January 8, making the C$18,000 a 2027 deduction.

Nothing in the June version is a disaster. It is tax paid a year early, a deduction taken a year late, and a slip filed late. That is the size of the prize — not one dramatic saving, a series of small ones that only exist if somebody read the calendar in October.

What Cadence does

We hold the year-end conversation in the quarter before your year-end rather than after it: what the corporation is likely to earn, what you have already taken out and how it was coded, whether anything on the capital list should go into service before the date, and what the compensation mix should be. Then we set it: the directors’ resolution, the payroll entries, the slip deadlines, the instalments that follow. That work sits inside tax planning and advice and is included in the year-round packages, with fee ranges on the pricing page. If your year-end has already gone by, the first thing we do is find out what is still open — usually more than owners expect, and less than they were hoping.