Start with the lever you do not have
Honest planning names the constraint first. Shares of a denturism professional corporation may only be held by members of the College of Denturists of Ontario, so the family-dividend arrangements dentists and physicians use are simply unavailable to you. No spouse shares, no sprinkling, and most TOSI analysis becomes moot because the ownership rules block the structure before the tax rules ever apply.
What survives is narrower but real: a spouse or adult child doing genuine front-desk, billing or bookkeeping work can earn a reasonable wage for it, deductible to the corporation and taxed in their hands. The test is that the pay matches the work, documented like any employee's. Our Tax Planning & Advisory engagements start by mapping which levers your structure actually permits, then pulling those hard instead of wishing for the others.
Salary, dividends and the deferral that does the heavy lifting
The corporation pays roughly 12.2% combined on its first $500,000 of active income in Ontario, while personal rates top out at 53.53%. Every dollar you do not need to live on can stay behind at the low rate, and that deferral, compounding inside the corporation, is the single biggest number in most denturists' plans.
For the dollars you do take, the blend is a design choice reviewed annually, not a slogan. Salary creates RRSP room and CPP entitlement and needs source deductions run on time; dividends skip the remittance machinery but build no room. Most owners land on a mix, set before year-end with the T4 and T5 consequences already worked out, and it should be re-decided in any year income jumps, a big case backlog clears, or a program payer changes your mix.
The bench is a timing instrument
The digital shift, intraoral scanners, design workstations, printers and mills, means denture clinics now make five-figure equipment decisions every few years. Tax cannot make a bad machine good, but timing changes when the deduction starts:
| Asset | CCA class and rate |
|---|---|
| Lab benches, curing units, articulators, chairs | Class 8, 20% declining balance |
| Scanners, design computers and software-driven kit | Class 50, 55% declining balance |
| Small tools under $500 | Class 12, fully deductible |
| Clinic build-out and leaseholds | Class 13, straight-line over the lease term |
| The clinic vehicle | Class 10, 30% declining balance |
The rule that matters is available for use: a mill delivered and running in December starts depreciating a full year before the same mill installed in January. When a purchase is coming anyway, we time it against the year's income, and when the spend is large enough we model the after-tax cost before you sign, because the deduction is a discount, never a reason.
What the corporation keeps, and where it sits
Retained earnings need a job. Left in the operating company and invested, passive income above $50,000 starts grinding the small business deduction away at five dollars of limit per dollar over, which quietly raises the rate on the active income the clinic earns. The plan decides, on purpose, the order of RRSP and TFSA contributions against corporate investing, and whether surplus should sit apart from the practice's operating risk.
Exit planning starts earlier here than most owners expect, because the buyer pool for shares is limited to other denturists. A qualifying share sale can still reach the $1.25M lifetime capital gains exemption, but many denture practices change hands as asset sales, so we plan the corporation to be ready for either, and coordinate with Estate Planning once the practice is the biggest asset in the family's picture.
A calendar, not a scramble
The plan runs on dates: a pre-year-end review while there is still time to buy, pay or defer; remuneration set before December 31; instalments retuned when income moves; and one conversation each year about what stays in the corporation. None of it is exotic. All of it beats deciding in April what should have been decided in November.
