Four clocks inside one pay run
A home care pay run has to reconcile four different measures of time, and getting any of them wrong creates either an ESA liability or an overpayment you never notice. Visit hours are the easy part. Travel between clients is paid work time under the ESA; only the commute to the first client and home from the last one is excluded. Vacation pay accrues on all of it, and public holiday pay for caregivers with variable hours follows its own formula rather than anyone's guess.
| Pay element | Where it comes from | How the pay run treats it |
|---|---|---|
| Visit hours | Scheduling platform export (AlayaCare or similar) | Pensionable, insurable wages; the base for everything below |
| Travel between clients | Trip times off the same schedule | Paid work time under the ESA; the first and last commute are not |
| Kilometres driven | Caregiver mileage log | Non-taxable when reimbursed at a reasonable per-kilometre rate; a flat car allowance is taxable pay |
| Vacation pay | Calculated on gross wages | 4% (6% after five years of service), including the travel-time wages |
| Public holiday pay | The prior four work weeks | Regular wages in the four work weeks before the holiday, divided by 20 |
The practical fix is to stop re-keying. We set the scheduling export as the single source of hours, map it into payroll, and reconcile paid hours to scheduled hours every cycle. When the two drift apart, that gap is either unpaid travel time building into a claim or phantom hours leaking margin, and either way you want to see it the same month it happens.
Invoices a family can check against the visit log
Families buying care are anxious buyers, and often the person paying is a son, daughter or attorney under a power of attorney who was not in the home. The invoice has to carry its own proof: date, caregiver, hours, rate, per visit, matching the visit records your coordinators keep. When the invoice mirrors the log, disputes shrink to scheduling questions; when it shows only "Care services — 87 hours", every bill becomes a negotiation. Executors ask for the same records later, sometimes years later.
We set up receivables to match how each payer behaves: funder and contract billing on the contract's cadence and format, and family billing on a fixed monthly rhythm with pre-authorized debit through Plooto so collection stops depending on someone's cheque book. Any care retainer a family pays up front sits as a liability until the hours are actually worked. That is not pedantry; it is what keeps a refund conversation calm.
Exempt revenue changes the cost side too
Most publicly funded home care is HST-exempt, and an agency with mostly exempt revenue claims few or no input tax credits. The consequence lands in the books: HST is part of the true cost of your scheduling software, office rent, training and supplies, so budgets built on sticker prices run roughly 13% light on those lines. We record costs the way you actually bear them. The full exemption analysis, including when private-pay hours stay exempt, lives with your tax filings; the bookkeeping just has to be built for the answer.
Employer costs stack the same way. CPP and EI employer shares, WSIB premiums, and eventually Ontario's Employer Health Tax once payroll clears the $1 million exemption all ride on top of wages. An agency quoting rates from wage cost alone is quoting from about three-quarters of the truth, which is why our monthly statements show fully loaded labour cost, not just gross pay.
One roof: books, payroll, statements, T2
Our End-to-End Accounting service runs bookkeeping, payroll, financial reporting and tax filing together, which suits an agency where all four touch the same visit data. QuickBooks Online carries the ledger, Dext captures receipts from coordinators' phones, and payroll remits source deductions on time with T4s out by the end of February. Year-end flows into the corporate T2 without a rebuild, because the books were kept for that purpose all year.
The monthly statements are written for a care business, not a generic one: revenue split by funded, contract and private-pay work, fully loaded labour cost against it, and receivables aged by payer type. Owners running growth decisions off those numbers usually graduate into deeper forecasting, and the books we keep are built to feed that next step rather than fight it.
