About the practice
Most people meet their tax preparer for twenty minutes a year, hand over an envelope, and get a number back. When a question comes up in June, there is nobody to ask.
Charanek Taxes & Accounting was founded in Calgary in 2024 to work the other way round: understand the situation first, explain what the return actually says, and remain reachable in June when something changes.
Your tax partner
Mo Charanek
Founder and principal
- Education2024
- Bachelor of Commerce in Accounting
- Certification2025
- QuickBooks Online Certified, Intuit
Mo founded Charanek Taxes & Accounting in Calgary in 2024, after completing a Bachelor of Commerce in Accounting. Across three filing seasons he has prepared and filed more than two hundred personal and small-business returns for around ninety clients, handling each from the first document through to filing with CRA.
Most of that work is for people whose returns are no longer simple: someone self-employed for the first time, a small business owner who has been keeping their own books and would rather not, a household with rental or investment income that a boxed software package has stopped serving.
He also handles full-cycle bookkeeping — reconciliations, payables and receivables, and restoring a set of books that have fallen behind. Most of it runs in QuickBooks Online, in which he is certified.
The practice is independent rather than a CPA firm. Audits, reviews and compilation engagements have to be issued by a registered CPA, and if your bank or a shareholder needs one, you will leave the conversation with names of CPAs who do that work. Everything else is what the practice does all year: personal returns, self-employment and rental income, small-business filings, and the bookkeeping underneath them.
210+
Returns filed
3
Tax filing seasons in practice
How the work is done
You see it before it is filed
Nothing is submitted to CRA until you have reviewed the draft and understood what it states. No return is filed on your behalf sight unseen.
Fees agreed in advance
A flat fee against a written scope, agreed before the work begins — not an invoice assembled afterwards from time you never saw.
Explained, not just filed
You will be told what a position costs and what it risks, in terms precise enough to act on without seeking a second opinion.
Ahead of the deadline
Deadlines are worked backwards from, not towards. Nothing material is discovered in the final week.
Referred, not strung along
Where something falls outside what this practice does, you will be pointed to someone who does it — at the moment it comes up, not after the bill.
Set up for next year
You will finish the engagement knowing which records to keep and how. Most of what is lost at tax time is lost to record-keeping, not to the rules.
They are used to prepare your return and nothing else. Records are retained for the period tax rules require, and are never shared with anyone outside the engagement without your instruction. If you would rather not email something sensitive, say so and a secure channel will be set up.
The practice opened in 2024 and has filed more than two hundred personal and small-business returns for around ninety clients across three filing seasons, on top of four years in finance and administration before that. Every return is prepared end to end by the same person.
No. Engagements are taken on one at a time, and only where the work is something this practice does well. If it is not a fit — the wrong kind of return, or no room left in the season — you will be told at the first call rather than a month later.
It gets corrected. An adjustment is filed with CRA, you are told what changed and why, and there is no charge for fixing an error made here. If the change comes from information that arrived late, that is quoted before any work starts.