T4

Being a corporation with employees, [[Reinvented]] has to file payroll summaries – T4s – with Canada Revenue before the end of February every year.

If memory serves correctly, in the first 12 years of our corporate existence I met this deadline, um, never.

But this year, I’m happy to report, it’s only February 6 and the the T4s are calculated and filed.

It’s hard to believe, as to file these electronically requires joining up two asynchronous events: the receipt of a “Web Access Code” from Canada Revenue in the mail sometime around the end of December and the actual use of this code to sign in to the T4 Web Forms website. Although it probably seems to digital bureaucrats that this is a simple filing exercise, it remains one of the most challenging bureaucratic duties of my usually just-in-time office lifestyle.

While it would be hard to describe the web application for filing T4s as intuitive – it’s essentially an electronic wrapper around a still-confusing paper-based process – Canada Revenue has made tiny improvements every year, to the point where it’s now at least usable. Indeed I went through the entire process in about 30 minutes for 3 employees.

Now, all I have to do is meet the RRSP deadline of March 1 and the GST filing deadline of March 31 and I’ll have a hat trick of filing perfection.