The ticket money was never yours
When a customer pays $10 for a lottery ticket, you have not made a $10 sale. You sold the ticket as OLG's retailer, the $10 belongs to OLG, and your revenue is the commission earned on the transaction. OLG settles weekly, debiting your bank account for ticket sales net of commissions and the prizes you paid out at the counter.
The classic error is booking the full ticket value as sales and the weekly OLG debit as an expense. Both sides of the income statement inflate by money that only passed through. The store looks far bigger than it is, gross margin collapses on paper, and the revenue figure the CRA compares against industry norms is wrong from the first line. There is no HST question hiding here either: the Excise Tax Act deems ticket sales made on behalf of a provincial gaming authority not to be a supply by the retailer, so lottery commissions carry no HST at all.
The same agency logic runs across the counter. Third-party gift cards, phone top-ups and transit fares are pass-throughs where the commission is the revenue. An ATM refill is cash moving from the till into the machine, not an expense, and the surcharge is the income. End-to-End Accounting puts bookkeeping, payroll, financial reporting and tax filing under one roof, built on exactly these distinctions.
Where each till line lands in the books
| What the register collects | Where it belongs |
|---|---|
| Lottery ticket sales | A payable to OLG, cleared by the weekly settlement |
| Lottery commission | Revenue, booked net, with no HST attached |
| Prizes paid at the counter | A reduction of the OLG payable, never an expense |
| Snacks, pop, tobacco and other taxable sales | Revenue plus a 13% HST liability |
| Basic groceries: milk, bread, eggs | Revenue at 0%, input tax credits untouched |
| Gift cards and phone top-ups | Face value as a pass-through, commission as revenue |
| ATM refills and surcharges | A cash transfer plus fee income, kept separate |
| Cash over/short | Its own line, trended weekly, never buried in sales |
A daily close beats a year-end dig
The Z-report is the day's truth, and it should reach the books while the day is fresh. We map POS departments into QuickBooks Online so lottery, tobacco, grocery, snacks and food service each keep their own sales and cost lines, and we run invoices from the jobbers and wholesale deliveries through Dext so paper never piles up behind the counter.
Deposits go to the bank intact. Paying the bread supplier or the window washer out of the till breaks the one chain of evidence a cash business has: the POS says a number, and the deposit slip says the same number. That chain is worth more to a convenience store than any convenience it buys, because it is what an auditor checks first.
Cash over/short gets its own account and a weekly look. A drawer that is short the same twenty dollars every Tuesday evening is telling you something that a monthly lump sum never would. The books are where the pattern becomes visible.
Inventory that respects the categories
A c-store's cost of goods is not one number. Tobacco arrives from registered wholesalers with Ontario tobacco tax already inside its cost, which makes it the most expensive inventory per shelf inch in the building. Dairy and bread carry dates and real spoilage. Beer and wine, which eligible convenience stores have sold under an AGCO licence since September 2024, deserve their own department from the first case, because the licence and the margins both get managed at that level.
We code purchases by department so margin by category is a report rather than a guess, and we set a count cadence so the book number meets a physical count on schedule. What those margins mean for pricing, ordering and shrink is decision territory; the bookkeeping's job is to make the question answerable without a rebuild.
Month-end for a store that never closes
Store owners we work with across Mississauga and the GTA get statements on a fixed rhythm: sales and margin by department, the HST position building toward the next return, payroll filed and remitted, and a balance sheet where the OLG settlement account actually clears to zero. Year-end then takes days, not months, because nothing waits for a shoebox.
A small store that mainly needs a CPA within reach can start with CPA Quick Support at $99 a month, unlimited questions and CRA letter review included. Fuller engagements are scoped and quoted in writing after a free 15-minute discovery call, with no hourly surprises.
