What year-round tax work looks like for an Ottawa small business

Most people meet their tax obligations once a year, in April, and treat the other eleven months as someone else's problem. For a salaried employee that mostly works. For anyone running a business in Ottawa it does not, because the deadlines that actually carry penalties are spread across the calendar and several of them are monthly.

Here is what the year actually looks like, and which numbers are worth knowing before you need them.

The deadlines that are not in April

If you have employees, source deductions are the obligation that punishes lateness hardest. A regular remitter sends CPP, EI and income tax withheld by the fifteenth of the month after the pay period. Being late is not a small administrative matter: the penalty is calculated on the amount, not on how sorry you are, and it escalates with how far past the due date you land.

If you are registered for GST/HST, your filing frequency is set by your revenue, and it can be monthly, quarterly or annual. The filing deadline and the payment deadline are not always the same date, which is where annual filers with instalment obligations most often get caught.

Corporate instalments run monthly or quarterly depending on the corporation. Personal instalments are due in March, June, September and December when the Canada Revenue Agency has asked for them. Interest on a missed instalment starts accruing from the instalment date, not from the filing deadline.

The $30,000 GST/HST threshold is not an annual number

This is the single most common misunderstanding among small Ottawa businesses, and it is worth stating plainly.

The small supplier threshold is $30,000, but it is tested on a rolling basis across four consecutive calendar quarters, not against a calendar year. A business can be comfortably under $30,000 for the year and still have crossed the threshold partway through it, because the four quarters being measured straddle a year end.

Crossing it matters immediately. You are required to register, and you begin charging GST/HST on supplies made after the effective date. Discovering this in the following spring means an unbilled liability on revenue you already collected and spent.

The numbers worth keeping in view for 2026

GST/HST small supplier threshold	$30,000 over four consecutive quarters
TFSA annual contribution limit, 2026	$7,000
Lowest federal bracket, 2026	14%
CPP earnings ceiling, 2026	$74,600 base, $85,000 for the second band
Maximum CPP2 contribution, 2026	$416.00 each from employee and employer
Lifetime capital gains exemption, 2026	$1,275,000
Capital gains inclusion rate	One half. The proposed increase to two thirds was cancelled.
Foreign property reporting threshold	$100,000 total cost, at any point in the year

That last one catches people who do not think of themselves as having foreign holdings. The test is total cost, not market value, and it is cumulative across all specified foreign property. Crypto held on an offshore exchange can count.

Records, and what six years actually means

The Canada Revenue Agency requires you to keep records for six years. The part people get wrong is when the clock starts. It runs from the end of the last tax year the records relate to, not from the date the document was created. A receipt from early in a fiscal year is retained longer than six calendar years from its own date.

Keeping them is not the hard part any more. Being able to produce a specific one, in order, on request, is the hard part, and it is the difference between an audit that takes an afternoon and an audit that takes a month.

How long the CRA can come back

The normal reassessment period is three years for individuals and Canadian-controlled private corporations, and four years for other corporations, measured from the date on the original notice of assessment.

Two things extend it. A waiver, which you sign. And misrepresentation attributable to neglect, carelessness or wilful default, where there is no limit at all. That second category is why a return filed on a guess is a liability that does not expire on schedule.

What year-round work looks like in practice

It is not a monthly meeting. For most small Ottawa businesses it is four things:

• Bookkeeping kept current enough that the remittance number is known before it is due, rather than reconstructed after.
• A watch on the rolling GST/HST threshold if revenue is anywhere near $30,000.
• A look at the instalment position partway through the year, while there is still time to change it.
• Records filed as they arrive, in a structure someone else could navigate.

None of that is complicated. All of it is easier to do continuously than to reconstruct in March.

About the author

Khaled Hawari is a tax and financial consultant and a senior technical project manager, working from Ottawa. He handles personal and corporate tax, bookkeeping, and CRA-compliant crypto reporting for Canadians, and works with clients in English, French and Arabic. Most clients call him Kal.

Figures above are for the 2026 tax year and are drawn from the Canada Revenue Agency's published amounts. Thresholds are indexed and change annually, so confirm the current year before acting on any of them.