Family wages the CRA accepts
Paying your spouse for the books and the counter, and your teenagers for weekend shifts, is one of the few income-splitting tools that works at any income level, because a reasonable wage for genuine work is simply deductible. The saving is mechanical: profit that would stack on top of your bracket is earned instead by someone in a lower one, and a student's wages often attract little or no tax at all. What decides the outcome is not the idea but the file behind it.
| The test | What we put in the file |
|---|---|
| The work is real | A short job description with duties you would otherwise hire for: phones, boxing, the counter, the books |
| The rate is market | What an unrelated student or clerk would earn for the same shift, not a number reverse-engineered from a bracket |
| The money actually moves | A payroll deposit into an account the family member controls and keeps |
| The hours are recorded | The schedule and the clock-ins, from 7shifts or the POS itself |
Wages also stay clear of the tax on split income, which catches dividends paid to family members and taxes them at the top rate unless a specific exclusion applies. Family pay runs through payroll with T4s and CPP like anyone else's; that cost is real, and the plan prices it in rather than pretending it away.
The write-offs bolted to the shop
The depreciation schedule of a pizza shop is largely set the day you sign, not the day you file. The fit-out of a rented unit, the hood, counters, flooring and millwork, goes into Class 13 and is written off straight-line over the lease term with a five-year minimum, so the term you negotiate is also the speed of the deduction. The deck or conveyor oven, dough mixer and walk-in cooler sit in Class 8 at 20% declining balance, and an initial fee for a fixed-term franchise agreement lands in Class 14, spread evenly across the years the agreement actually grants.
The delivery car is its own decision. A shop-owned sedan is a passenger vehicle, so its CCA claim is capped at the prescribed cost ceiling regardless of the sticker, and it needs commercial insurance. Paying drivers a reasonable per-kilometre allowance for their own cars is fully deductible, tax-free in their hands and puts no asset on your books. Delivery volume, insurance quotes and driver turnover decide which side wins, and we price both routes before anyone visits a dealership.
Owner pay from what the counter clears
After family wages, the owner's own mix of salary and dividends is the next lever, and it is a yearly decision rather than a permanent one. Salary is deductible to the corporation and builds RRSP room and CPP; dividends can wait until the year has proved itself. Profit the household does not need can simply stay put: inside the corporation the first $500,000 of active income is taxed at roughly 12.2% combined in Ontario, which is the cheapest financing a replacement oven or a second counter will ever get.
We set the mix each fall inside Tax Planning & Advisory, while there is still time to act before year-end, and file the household side through Personal Tax Filing so the corporate and personal returns are decided as one picture. If the structure itself is the question, whether to incorporate at all or how the shares should sit, that lives on our pizza shop incorporation page.
A calendar the counter can keep
Tax trouble at a takeout counter is rarely clever; it is missed dates compounding. The plan puts every obligation on one calendar: payroll remittances monthly, HST funded from a standing weekly transfer rather than discovered at the deadline, and corporate instalments once the annual bill passes $3,000, sized from the year you are actually having instead of last year's guess. Interest on a missed instalment is not deductible, so the calendar is itself a tax strategy.
A fall planning session then sets the coming year deliberately: the family payroll and rates, the CCA claims worth taking or deferring, and any equipment purchase worth completing early enough to be in service before year-end. For shops across Mississauga and the GTA, the whole plan is quoted in writing after a free 15-minute discovery call, so the fee is known before the first working paper opens.
