Every payer sends a different statement
A single month can land as six deposits from five payers: the dealer's commission run net of your grid, trailers pooled across every fund family you hold, first-year and renewal commissions from two or three insurance carriers, and the planning fees you invoiced directly. Each deposit comes with its own statement, its own net-of-something arithmetic and its own timing. Books that dump all of it into one commission-income account cannot answer the two questions that matter: what is each stream worth, and did everything you earned actually arrive.
So we start with the chart of accounts. Revenue is split by stream, and every statement is reconciled to the bank rather than the bank to itself. That structure is what our End-to-End Accounting service builds on: bookkeeping, payroll, financial reporting and tax filing under one roof, mapped to how an advisory practice actually earns.
| Revenue stream | Where it reports | What we reconcile |
|---|---|---|
| Dealer commissions | Dealer commission run, net of grid | Payout percentage against your agreement, gross to net |
| Trailers | Back-office statement, pooled monthly | By fund family, against prior months and the bank |
| Insurance first-year commission | Carrier or MGA statement | Net of a chargeback reserve, policy by policy |
| Insurance renewals | Carrier statement | Persistency of the block, year over year |
| Planning fees | Your own invoices | Issued versus collected, with HST coded correctly |
Trailers get tracked by fund family
Trailer income is the recurring value of your practice, and a lump monthly deposit hides everything useful about it. We break trailers out by fund family from the dealer's back-office reporting and tie each family to what reached the bank. The detail earns its keep three ways:
- Missed trailers surface immediately. When a client transfers out or a fund is merged away, that family's trailer drops the same month. Stream-level tracking shows the drop while it is still worth chasing, instead of a vague sense that revenue felt light this quarter.
- Your grid gets verified. The payout rate applied to each run is checked against your dealer agreement rather than assumed to be right, and grid-tier changes are caught the month they take effect.
- The book stays saleable on paper. Any serious buyer asks for recurring revenue by source over the trailing 24 months. Records that can produce that in an afternoon let you negotiate from strength.
Chargebacks are a liability you can see coming
First-year insurance commission is not fully yours until the chargeback window closes; carriers commonly claw back some or all of it when a policy lapses within the first 24 months. We hold a reserve against fresh first-year commission instead of letting the income statement show gross, then write actual chargebacks against that reserve so the books show what you truly kept. The same discipline covers annualized and advanced commission: cash received is not yet income earned, and a practice that spends gross gets ambushed in a soft persistency year.
Revenue coding does the HST work early
Commissions for placing products are generally exempt financial services, while fee-for-service planning is usually taxable at 13% in Ontario. A mixed practice needs every invoice and deposit coded to the correct side of that line each month, because input tax credits belong only to the taxable side. We keep the split live in the books all year, so the HST return and corporate tax filing become a summary rather than an investigation. How the split works, and when registration is even required, is its own topic; the bookkeeping's job is to make the answer visible.
Sized for a practice of one
Most advisory practices are one licensed person, perhaps an assistant, and no appetite for a software project. We run QuickBooks Online with Dext for receipt capture, close monthly, and send a short report that shows each revenue stream against last year, the way you wish clients read their own statements. Practice costs are captured on the same rhythm: E&O premiums, FSRA licence renewals, dealer charges and planning-software subscriptions, so nothing deductible leaks. Advisors across Mississauga and the GTA bring those numbers to their own annual reviews. If you are solo with simple flows, CPA Quick Support at $99/month covers the questions between year-ends; fuller engagements are quoted in writing after a free 15-minute discovery call.
