Each launch funds its own taxes before it funds anything else
The single highest-value habit for a launch business is a per-launch sweep: within days of cart close, the HST you collected and an estimate of the income tax on the launch profit move to a separate account they never leave. There is no universal percentage worth printing, because the right number depends on your structure, your province mix and your margins, so we compute it from your actual results and refresh it after every launch. A coach who runs this rule is genuinely indifferent to filing deadlines; a coach who does not is financing the CRA's money interest-free in reverse.
Price with the tax inside or on top: decide once, on purpose
Course pricing culture loves clean stickers: $997, all-in, same for everyone. Advertise that way and the sales tax comes out of your sticker, not on top of it. On an Ontario student, a $997 all-in enrolment is roughly $882 of revenue and $115 of HST you are holding for the CRA; on an Alberta student the same sticker keeps about $950 of revenue. Charge tax on top instead and your revenue per seat is fixed while Canadian buyers see totals that differ by province. Neither answer is wrong. Pretending you have not chosen, and finding out at filing time that 13/113 of a launch was never yours, is the expensive version. We put the choice in the plan with the margin math attached.
Salary, dividends and smoothing the spike
Once a corporation is in place, it becomes the shock absorber: the company earns three spikes a year and pays you one level amount. Active profit up to $500,000 is taxed at roughly 12.2% combined in Ontario, and what stays behind after your draw becomes the buffer that carries payroll and ad spend to the next open cart. Salary creates RRSP room at 18% of what you pay yourself and builds CPP; dividends are simpler and more flexible; most coaches land on a mix that we revisit every year rather than set once.
Family pay needs care. A spouse who genuinely runs your launch support, the inbox, the community, the tech checklist, can be paid a reasonable wage for that work. Dividends to family members who do not meaningfully work in the business are generally caught by TOSI and taxed at the top rate, which removes the point. If the structure question itself is still open, that is our Incorporation conversation.
Instalments: the echo of a launch year
A big year does not end when you file it. Once tax owing crosses $3,000, the CRA expects instalments the following year, and the reminders it mails are calculated from your record year, not your current one. For a business rebuilding its list or resting between offers, prior-year instalments can be brutal. You are allowed to pay based on a current-year estimate instead, and interest applies only if the estimate falls short, so we run that decision with the forecast open rather than defaulting to whichever number arrived in the mail. Incorporated coaches meet the same logic on the corporate side.
The planning calendar, launch edition
Planning for a coach is not a March event; it hangs off the launch calendar. This is the cadence we run inside Tax Planning & Advisory:
| Moment | The move |
|---|---|
| Before cart opens | Confirm all-in vs plus-tax pricing and the set-aside rate for this launch |
| Cart-close week | Sweep HST and tax set-asides; log the payment-plan book the launch created |
| Each quarter | Check instalments against the current-year forecast, not last year's spike |
| 90 days before year-end | Set the owner pay mix; check whether the next cohort should open before or after year-end |
| February to April | Slips, returns, and a refreshed plan built on what the launches actually did |
That year-end row earns its keep: a cohort that opens in late December and delivers in the new year lands differently than one that opens two weeks later, because collected-but-undelivered revenue can be recognized with delivery. Shifting an open-cart date is free; discovering the difference after year-end is not. Where the launch pattern is strong enough that structure, not timing, is the bottleneck, planning hands the question to incorporation, and we cover that decision on its own page.
