One good season has to pay for two
An Ontario painting company earns most of its profit between May and October, when exteriors run, and defends it from November to April on interior repaints and commercial work. Left alone, that shape is a tax problem: a strong exterior season taken straight out of the company stacks into the owner's top personal brackets in the good years, then leaves nothing to average against a wet summer. A corporation fixes the shape. Profit retained inside is taxed at roughly 12.2% on the first $500,000 of active income, the owner draws a level salary through all twelve months, and dividends are declared once the season's real number is known rather than guessed at in July. The retained profit is also the winter payroll fund that keeps a good lead painter off a competitor's crew in January, which makes it a tax plan and a retention plan in one.
Salary and dividends do different work inside that plan. Salary creates RRSP room and CPP entitlement and makes winter household cash predictable; dividends flex with the year and can be pushed into a leaner one. Where a spouse genuinely runs scheduling, colour approvals and collections, a reasonable wage for that work is deductible like any other; family dividends are a different tool entirely, since TOSI taxes most of them at top rates unless a specific exclusion applies.
The tax calendar does not care that it is February
Every painting owner knows the season. The planning failure is that remittances ignore it: corporate instalments, quarterly for eligible small CCPCs once tax payable passes $3,000, keep arriving through the thin months, T4s are due at the end of February, and the RRSP deadline lands 60 days into the new year, all while the crews are on slower interior work. The fix is mechanical. During peak billing we set a fixed percentage of every collected invoice aside into a tax account, so winter's payments draw on money the summer already earned.
| Where the season is | What the tax calendar is doing to cash |
|---|---|
| Spring: booking builds, deposits arrive | Deposits are a liability, not income yet; instalments resume against last year's numbers |
| Peak exterior months | Most of the year's profit lands; the per-invoice tax set-aside runs on every collection |
| Late fall: exteriors close | Pre-year-end review while a bonus, a purchase or a dividend can still change the answer |
| Winter interior months | T4s by end of February, RRSP deadline 60 days in, instalments continue; the funded account pays them |
Three levers that only work before year-end
The 180-day bonus is the smoothing tool built into the Income Tax Act: accrue a bonus to the owner at year-end and the corporation deducts it now, provided it is paid within 180 days, while the owner is taxed only when it is received. With a fall year-end, that bridges a strong season's deduction into the owner's next calendar year, a timing gap worth real money at painting margins.
Equipment follows the available-for-use clock. An airless sprayer, scaffold frames or a pressure washer delivered before year-end starts its Class 8 claim at 20% declining balance a full year ahead of the same purchase a month later, and the van runs in Class 10 at 30%. One more lever hides in the hiring: Painter and Decorator is a Red Seal trade, so a registered apprentice in the first 24 months of the program makes the company eligible for the federal apprenticeship credit of 10% of wages, to $2,000 per apprentice per year, a claim that fails on missing training-agreement paperwork far more often than on eligibility.
Planning runs on a calendar, not a deadline
Our Tax Planning & Advisory work follows the season: the owner-pay mix and any family wages set in spring, the set-aside percentage confirmed when peak billing starts, a pre-year-end meeting in the fall while the bonus, dividend and purchase levers still move, and instalments reset after each corporate filing. The fiscal year-end itself is the one lever chosen only once, at incorporation, which is why we steer painting companies toward a year-end that follows the exterior season instead of splitting it.
Every engagement starts with a free 15-minute discovery call and a written quote, and we plan for painting contractors across Mississauga and the GTA. The measure of the work is a quiet spring: no instalment surprises and no scramble, because the season that made the money also funded its tax.
