I've now had 4 different planned tax accountants "drop through", one turned out not to be able to do corporate tax (duh! wish I'd known that before waiting until she was free), the one recommended by her used to do taxes for big corporations but doesn't touch taxes any more, and two others (recommended again) just don't call me back. So, rather than hit late fees/penalties I'm doing them myself this year.

Getting the books up-to-date and the chart of accounts corrected took about 8 hours. I initially used a free chart of accounts for GnuCash for running a consultancy in Canada. Unfortunately, the chap who created it doesn't seem to have actually understood the GIFI codes and wound up with the wrong codes all over, putting liability codes in for expenses and such silly things. Worse to have the wrong ones than not have any at all, really.

During this managed to fix the problem in GnuCash I'd been having, namely not having the Canadian currency default. There are two "options" areas, one for the file and one for the program, I didn't realise there was a program-level one. With that fixed I can get the reports I need.

The next 12 hours was the closing of the books (which, as I found out a few months ago, is a pretty trivial operation, you just move income and expenses over to retained earnings) and the Canadian taxes themselves.

The corporate tax form is nowhere near as clear as the personal form, lots of extra jargon, lots of forward references (requiring you to guess whether you will have a value in a field, though it seems that if you use page two as an index to what you need to fill out you can answer a lot of the questions faster) and lots of questions that are simply impenetrable, requiring you to read the manual (and for a couple of schedules there's almost nothing in the manual) and/or search around the net for information.

Plus side is that while there's a 38% corporate tax in Canada, there are two big deductions available for small businesses. In our case they reduce the total Federal tax to about 7%. Ontario taxes (which I haven't finished yet) looking like another 7% or so.

New subcontractor coming online this week for about 3 weeks. Other than that, business as usual.