Book the commission, not the deposit
Every closed deal produces a trade record sheet, and that document, not your bank feed, is where realtor accounting starts. It shows the deal, your share of the commission, the 13% HST on that share, and then the deductions: transaction fees, franchise royalties, anything owing on your brokerage ledger. Your revenue is your commission before those deductions; what reaches your account is simply the remainder.
Record only the deposit and three things break at once. Income is understated, the fees you paid have disappeared instead of being deducted, and your HST filing will not reconcile to what the brokerage paid you. We post each deal the way the statement reads, so when the CRA matches brokerage records to your return, and it can, the numbers agree line by line.
Splits, board dues and desk costs run on three clocks
A realtor's costs do not arrive on one schedule, and mixing the streams distorts every month you look at:
- Per-deal charges: transaction fees, royalty splits and deal-level marketing, deducted from the cheque and visible only on the trade record sheet.
- Monthly charges: desk fees, technology fees and CRM or portal subscriptions, hitting a card whether you close or not.
- Annual dues: board, OREA and CREA memberships plus RECO registration, invoiced once and best spread across the year so January does not read as a disaster.
Referral fees deserve their own note. In Ontario they flow brokerage to brokerage, so a fee you owe another agent appears as a deduction on a statement rather than a cheque you wrote. It has to be captured from the paperwork, or the deduction is simply lost.
Deduction discipline: records that survive a review
Commission agents file deduction-heavy returns and the CRA knows it, which is why vehicle and marketing claims are among its most-reviewed lines for realtors. The claim is rarely the problem; the record is. This is what we keep on file behind each category:
| Deduction | What supports it |
|---|---|
| Vehicle | A kilometre log separating showings and client trips from personal driving; costs prorated by business use; CCA in Class 10 or 10.1 |
| Staging and photography | Invoices tied to a listing address; any client reimbursement booked as income, never netted away |
| Marketing | Invoices for signage, portals and ad platforms, with personal-benefit spending kept out |
| Client meals and gifts | Meals claimed at 50% with the client and purpose noted; gift receipts kept per recipient |
| Home office | A square-footage calculation, with the claim capped so it cannot create a loss |
Discipline also means keeping things out. Clothing, personal grooming and the family portion of a phone plan are the classic realtor claims that fail on review and put every other line under suspicion. A return where each number has a document behind it usually ends a review in one letter.
Collapsed deals still cost money
Not every listing sells and not every buyer transacts, but the staging, photography, fuel and hours were spent either way. Those costs are deductible: you incurred them to earn commission income, and the deal dying does not change that. What it does change is your view of profitability, because a gross-commission number tells you nothing about the four listings that carried costs and produced no cheque.
So we tag spending to deals and clients where it belongs. Over a year that produces the numbers worth having: what a closed transaction really cost you, which price bands and neighbourhoods carry the worst fall-through, and how much dead spend your marketing budget quietly absorbs. Agents who see those figures price their listings, and their time, differently.
The monthly rhythm, and who it suits
Our End-to-End Accounting service runs realtor books on a monthly cycle. Statements and receipts flow in through Dext, we post them in QuickBooks Online deal by deal, HST is tracked continuously for the filing period, and if your PREC pays you a salary, the payroll remittances happen on time inside the same engagement. Year-end stops being a shoebox project: the corporate tax filing or T2125 falls out of books that were right all year.
Newer agents closing a handful of deals a year usually need answers more than they need monthly service. CPA Quick Support at $99/month exists for that stage: unlimited questions, three topics a month and CRA letter review, from a Mississauga CPA firm that works with agents across the GTA. When volume grows, the books graduate with you.
