# Charanek Taxes & Accounting — full text > Independent tax preparation and full-cycle bookkeeping for Calgary individuals and small businesses. Charanek Taxes & Accounting is a tax and bookkeeping practice in Calgary, Alberta, Canada, founded in 2024 by Mo Charanek (Founder and principal). Qualifications: Bachelor of Commerce in Accounting; QuickBooks Online Certified, Intuit. 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. Service area: Calgary and area, and remote across Alberta. Contact: mo@charanek.ca. --- ## About Mo Charanek — Founder and principal - Education: Bachelor of Commerce in Accounting (2024) - Certification: QuickBooks Online Certified, Intuit (2025) 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. --- ## Services ### Personal tax returns (T1) https://www.charanek.ca/services/personal-tax Your T1 prepared and filed properly — for the years where boxed software stops being enough and a wrong answer costs real money. **What this involves.** Personal returns are handled end to end: gathering the slips, working out what is actually claimable, preparing the return, reviewing it with you before anything is submitted, and filing it with CRA. You get a copy of everything and a plain summary of what changed from last year. **Who it is for.** People whose return has outgrown a boxed software package — a first year self-employed, a rental property, investments sold during the year, support payments, a move between provinces, or simply a year you would rather not guess at. **What commonly goes wrong.** - Foreign holdings over $100,000 that trigger a T1135 nobody mentioned - Rental income reported without the capital-versus-expense split considered - Medical and moving expenses left unclaimed because the receipts looked marginal - A prior year filed wrong and never adjusted, quietly repeating every year since **What to expect.** A checklist up front so you are not hunting for documents twice, a draft to review before anything is filed, and a straight answer on anything unusual. **Fees.** A flat fee per return, set by complexity and agreed before work starts. A straightforward return sits at the low end; rental property or foreign reporting moves it up. ### Self-employed and small-business tax https://www.charanek.ca/services/self-employed-tax For sole proprietors and side businesses — the business schedule done properly, with the expense questions answered before you file. **What this involves.** If you are self-employed or running an unincorporated business, your business results are reported on your personal return. That schedule is prepared from your records — sorting what is deductible from what is not, handling the home-office and vehicle calculations, and applying capital cost allowance where it belongs. **Who it is for.** Sole proprietors, contractors, tradespeople, consultants, and anyone with a side business that has grown past the point where guessing at expenses feels comfortable. **What commonly goes wrong.** - Personal and business spending mixed in one account, making every expense a judgement call - Equipment expensed in full when it should have been depreciated over time - Home-office and vehicle claims calculated on a rule of thumb rather than the actual basis - No instalments set aside, so the first profitable year arrives with a bill and interest **What to expect.** Work starts from whatever records exist. Where they are thin, you will be told what to keep next year and how — most of the money lost here is lost to record-keeping, not to the rules. **Fees.** A flat fee covering the personal return and the business schedule together, agreed before work starts. ### Bookkeeping https://www.charanek.ca/services/bookkeeping Full-cycle bookkeeping in QuickBooks Online — reconciled monthly, or brought back into order if it has slipped. **What this involves.** Journal entries, bank and credit card reconciliations, payables and receivables, and recurring payment scheduling — kept current month to month so the books are ready when a deadline arrives rather than rebuilt in a rush. The practice works primarily in QuickBooks Online, and is certified in it. **Who it is for.** Small businesses past the spreadsheet stage, and anyone whose books have fallen behind far enough that catching up alone has stopped being realistic. **What commonly goes wrong.** - A year of uncategorised transactions arriving at the filing deadline - Personal and business spending mixed in the same account - GST collected but never set aside, discovered at year end - Books that reconcile but produce statements nobody uses to make decisions **What to expect.** Work begins with a review of what exists, and a plain account of what shape it is in and what catching up would take. Cleanup is quoted separately from the ongoing monthly work, so you can see which is which. **Fees.** A flat monthly fee based on transaction volume and the number of accounts. Catch-up work is quoted separately after a review of the file. --- ## Fees https://www.charanek.ca/pricing - **Personal return (T1) — $150** Employment, pension and standard credits, with a review of the prior year for anything missed. - **Personal return with rental or investment income — $275** Rental schedules, dispositions and the capital-versus-expense treatment that goes with them. - **Self-employed return (T1 with business schedule) — $350** The business schedule prepared from your records, including home-office, vehicle and capital cost treatment. - **GST return, standalone — $125** One filing period prepared from books you already keep, with an input tax credit review before filing. - **Bookkeeping catch-up — $65 / hour** For books behind by a quarter or more. Estimated in writing after a review, so the total is known before work starts. - **QuickBooks Online setup — $350** Chart of accounts, bank feeds, opening balances and a walkthrough so you can keep it running day to day. - **CRA correspondence — $95 / hour** Reading the letter, assembling documents and responding. Scope is set by CRA, so this is hourly with an estimate up front. --- ## Common questions ### What do you need from me? Last year's return to start from, your slips as they arrive, and — if there is a business — whatever records exist, in whatever state they are in. You get a checklist up front so nothing is chased twice, and anything missing is flagged early rather than on the filing deadline. ### Do you take on everyone who asks? 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. ### What happens to my documents? 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. ### How long have you been doing this? 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. ### What if something is wrong after it is filed? 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. --- ## Insights ### The two tax dates that matter, and the one people get wrong https://www.charanek.ca/blog/the-two-tax-dates-that-matter · Tax · published 2026-06-18 Most people know one date: April 30. If you are employed, that is genuinely the whole story — file and pay by April 30 and nothing else applies. If you are self-employed, there are two dates, they are different, and the gap between them is where the money goes. #### Self-employment moves one date, not both If you or your spouse carried on a business during the year, your **filing** deadline moves to June 15. Your **payment** deadline does not: any balance owing is still due April 30. So the return can be filed in June, but if you pay in June you have been accruing interest since May 1. This catches people every single year, usually in their first or second year of self-employment, and usually because someone told them "you get until June" without saying what for. #### Interest is not a penalty, and it is not deductible CRA charges compound daily interest on an overdue balance at the prescribed rate plus a margin. It is separate from the late-filing penalty, which is 5% of the balance owing plus 1% for each full month the return is late, up to twelve months. File late *and* pay late and you get both. File on time but pay late and you get interest only — which is why filing on time matters even when you cannot pay the balance yet. #### Instalments are the real fix If you owed more than $3,000 in net tax in the current year and in either of the two previous years, CRA will generally expect you to pay by quarterly instalments rather than in one lump. People who pay instalments properly rarely have the April problem at all, because the balance at filing is small. The usual reason instalments go wrong is that they are based on a year that no longer resembles the current one: a strong year paid on last year's figures leaves a large balance, and a weak year overpays and lends CRA money at no interest. #### What to do about it If you are self-employed, put both dates in the calendar, not one. Work out roughly what you will owe before April rather than discovering it in June. And if a balance is going to be large, know that in February — there is a lot that can be done in February and very little that can be done in July. ### Should you incorporate? The honest answer is usually 'not yet' https://www.charanek.ca/blog/should-you-incorporate-usually-not-yet · Business · published 2026-05-22 Incorporation is sold as a milestone. It is really a tax-deferral tool with meaningful fixed costs, and it only starts paying for itself at a certain point. #### What incorporation actually gives you The main benefit is **deferral**, not savings. A Canadian-controlled private corporation pays a low rate on active business income up to the small business limit. But that advantage only exists on income you *leave in the company*. Money you take out to live on gets taxed personally on the way out, and the combined result is roughly what you would have paid as a sole proprietor. This is called integration, and it works well enough that if you spend everything the business earns, incorporating saves you approximately nothing. #### The costs nobody leads with - A corporate return every year, whether or not the company did anything - Year-end financial statements - A separate bank account, separate books, and a payroll or dividend mechanism to pay yourself - Annual corporate filings with Alberta Corporate Registry or the federal registry - A separate provincial corporate return each year, on top of the federal one — Alberta is one of only two provinces that collects its own Together these are a recurring annual cost that a sole proprietorship does not carry. #### The rough test Incorporation tends to make sense when you are consistently earning more than you need to live on, and the surplus is large enough that deferring tax on it outweighs the annual cost of maintaining the corporation. Where that line falls depends on your province and your personal spending — it is arithmetic, not a rule of thumb. #### The non-tax reasons that are often better reasons Limited liability matters in some sectors and is nearly irrelevant in others. Some clients simply will not contract with an unincorporated supplier. And if you intend to sell the business, the lifetime capital gains exemption on qualified small business corporation shares is a large enough number to change the plan on its own. Those reasons are legitimate. "It saves tax" usually is not, at least not yet. > Incorporating is a decision worth taking advice on before you act, not after. If you are weighing it, get someone to run the arithmetic against your actual numbers. ### The $30,000 GST threshold catches people mid-year https://www.charanek.ca/blog/the-30000-gst-threshold-catches-people-mid-year · Tax · published 2026-04-30 Most people know there is a $30,000 threshold for GST registration. Fewer know how it is measured, and that is where the trouble starts. In Alberta there is no provincial sales tax, so GST is the only sales tax to think about — simpler than most of the country, and easy to stop watching for exactly that reason. #### It is a rolling four-quarter test You stop being a small supplier when your worldwide taxable revenue exceeds $30,000 over **four consecutive calendar quarters** — not over a fiscal year, and not over a calendar year. The test runs continuously. There is also a single-quarter rule: exceed $30,000 in one quarter alone and you cease to be a small supplier immediately, effective on the sale that pushed you over. #### The two rules have different clocks This is the part worth getting right, because the two tests do not bite at the same moment. Cross the threshold gradually, over four consecutive quarters, and you stop being a small supplier **at the end of the month following the quarter in which you crossed**. Your effective registration date is the day of your first sale after that, and you have 29 days from that date to register. So there is a short grace period built in. Cross it inside a single quarter and there is no grace period at all. You cease to be a small supplier on the sale that took you over, that sale is itself taxable, and you have 29 days from it to register. #### Why that matters From your effective date you are required to charge GST, whether or not you have noticed. If it takes you four months to work that out, you have four months of sales on which tax should have been collected and was not. CRA will still expect the tax. You can either go back to clients and ask for more money on invoices they have already paid, or absorb it out of your own margin. #### Selling outside Alberta changes the rate This is the part that catches Alberta businesses selling into other provinces. The rate is generally determined by where the customer is, not where you are. Sell to a client in Ontario and the place-of-supply rules will usually have you charging HST at Ontario's rate, not Alberta's 5%. Businesses that have only ever charged 5% often discover this after they have been invoicing out of province for a year. #### The part that softens it Registration also lets you claim input tax credits on the GST you pay on business purchases. For a business with meaningful expenses — equipment, fuel, subcontractors, professional fees — registering is often not the burden it looks like. For businesses selling mainly to other registered businesses, voluntary early registration frequently makes sense. Your clients claim the tax back, so your price is effectively unchanged to them, and you start recovering tax on your own costs immediately. #### Practical advice Track the rolling four-quarter figure, not the annual one. If you are within a few thousand dollars of the threshold, register before you cross rather than after — the grace period is measured in weeks, and it is not the kind of thing you want to be reconstructing later. And if you have started selling outside Alberta, check the place-of-supply rules before the next invoice goes out, not after twelve of them have. ### A CRA letter arrived. What to do in the first week https://www.charanek.ca/blog/a-cra-letter-arrived-what-to-do-first · CRA · published 2026-03-14 A letter from CRA is not automatically an audit. The large majority are processing reviews — routine, narrow, and resolved by sending in the document that was asked for. #### Work out what you are actually holding There is a real difference between a **pre-assessment or processing review** (verifying one claim on one return), a **request for information**, and an **audit** (an examination of your books, usually with a named auditor and a scope letter). The response effort is not remotely the same, and treating a review like an audit wastes money while treating an audit like a review creates risk. #### Note the deadline before anything else CRA letters carry response deadlines, typically 30 days. Missing one usually means the claim is simply disallowed and you are reassessed — then you are arguing to get something back rather than to keep it, which is a materially worse position. If you need more time, ask for it. Extensions are commonly granted when requested before the deadline rather than after. #### Answer narrowly Send what was asked for. Not the rest of the file, not a fuller explanation than the question requires, not context that was not requested. This is not about concealment — it is that a review is scoped to a specific claim, and volunteering unrelated material invites questions that were never on the table. Answer the question that was asked, completely and accurately. #### Keep the paper trail Send documents in a way that produces proof of delivery and date. Keep a copy of everything sent. If you speak to an agent by phone, note the date, time and agent identification number. #### When to bring someone in If the letter concerns more than one year, uses the word audit, proposes an adjustment you disagree with, or concerns an area where you are unsure the original position was right — get a representative authorised before you respond. An authorised representative can deal with CRA directly, and the first response is much easier to get right than to correct later. If you have already been reassessed, there is still a route: a Notice of Objection. For an individual the deadline is the later of 90 days from the date on the notice and one year after the filing due date for that return — which is often more time than people assume, though never enough to be casual about. For a corporation it is the 90 days alone. Miss it and you can apply for an extension, but that is a discretionary application rather than a right. ### Two years behind on the books: how catch-up actually works https://www.charanek.ca/blog/two-years-behind-on-the-books · Bookkeeping · published 2026-01-20 Falling behind on bookkeeping is the single most common reason people call an accountant for the first time. It is recoverable. What it costs depends on the state of the records, not on how long it has been. #### The variable that matters is documentation, not time Two years of transactions in a dedicated business bank account, with statements available and most receipts somewhere, is a mechanical job. It takes hours, but they are predictable hours. Two years of business and personal spending mixed in one account, with cash transactions and no receipts, is a reconstruction. Every transaction needs a decision, and decisions are what cost money. If you are behind, the highest-value thing you can do before calling anyone is separate the accounts going forward. It does not fix the past, but it stops the problem growing. #### Do the oldest year first Catch-up runs oldest to newest, because each year's closing balances are the next year's opening balances. It also means the oldest filing — the one accruing penalties and interest longest — gets resolved first. #### Expect the GST to be the painful part Income tax on a late return is often less alarming than expected, particularly if the business was not especially profitable. GST is different: if you were registered and collecting, that money was never yours. It was held on behalf of the government, and it has usually been spent. This is the number that surprises people, and it is worth knowing early rather than at the end. #### Relief is available, but it is not automatic The **Voluntary Disclosures Program** can waive penalties and a share of the interest for taxpayers who come forward and correct an incomplete or unfiled return. How much relief you get turns on whether the disclosure was *unprompted* or *prompted*: coming forward on your own attracts full penalty relief and most of the interest relief, while coming forward after CRA has already nudged you — an education letter, a general notice about your sector — still qualifies, but for a good deal less interest relief. What closes the door is an audit or investigation already underway on the matter you want to disclose. That is a later point than most people assume, so a letter in the mailbox is a reason to move quickly, not a reason to conclude you have missed your chance. It is worth asking. Separately, the **taxpayer relief provisions** allow CRA to waive penalties and interest in circumstances such as serious illness or events beyond your control. It is discretionary, it must be requested with supporting facts, and it reaches back only ten calendar years. Both are reasons to deal with this sooner. The arithmetic on waiting is never favourable.