Your remittance schedule will not stay monthly for long
Source-deduction deadlines are set by your average monthly withholding, and an agency running weekly payroll crosses the thresholds early. At $25,000 of average monthly withholding the CRA moves you to remitting up to twice a month; at $100,000 you remit within three working days of each pay-period grouping, which against a weekly payroll means remitting essentially every week. Late remittances draw penalties of 3 to 10 percent depending on how late, and 20 percent for a repeat, so the remittance calendar is not clerical detail; it is one of the larger financial risks in the business.
We fold remittances into the payroll run itself under End-to-End Accounting, so the payment leaves the same process that calculated it and the schedule change arrives as a planned event, not a CRA letter.
EHT arrives the year payroll passes $1 million
Ontario's Employer Health Tax gives eligible private-sector employers an exemption on the first $1 million of Ontario remuneration, and a temp desk of any real size burns through that quickly because assignment workers are your payroll, not the client's. Above the exemption the rate runs up to 1.95 percent, monthly instalments become mandatory once Ontario payroll passes $1.2 million, and the annual return is due March 15. Two more edges catch agencies: the exemption disappears entirely for employers with more than $5 million of Ontario payroll, and associated corporations share a single exemption between them.
T4 season is a production run, not a task
High worker churn means an agency can issue several times more T4s than it has people on assignment in any one week, and every slip is due with the summary by the last day of February. Volume also raises the odds of a PIER review, the CRA's automated check that CPP and EI on each slip match what the pay history implies, where part-year workers and multiple pay groups generate most of the false positives. We build the slip run from the same payroll data we maintained all year, and answer the PIER queries from working papers instead of memory. The steady stream of ROEs that churn creates is handled in the same weekly process.
HST: collected on the gross, kept for nobody
Staffing services are taxable, so you charge 13 percent HST on gross billings to Ontario clients, and on perm placement fees too. Because your dominant cost is wages, which carry no HST, input tax credits barely dent what you collect, and the net remittance in a period can rival the entire gross margin earned in it. That money is held in trust, and the discipline is structural: a separate account funded every week, because an HST balance spent as working capital is the classic staffing-agency failure. Two more points need watching: place-of-supply rules mean a client in another province is generally billed that province's rate, 5 percent GST for an Alberta client for instance, and once taxable supplies pass $6 million, monthly filing is mandatory.
The whole calendar, on one page
| Filing | When it lands |
|---|---|
| Source deductions | Up to weekly, set by your remitter category |
| T4 slips and summary | Last day of February |
| EHT instalments and annual return | Monthly past $1.2M payroll; return March 15 |
| WSIB premium reporting | Monthly or quarterly, as WSIB assigns |
| HST return | Monthly once taxable supplies pass $6M |
| T2 corporate return | Six months after year-end; balance owing earlier |
The T2 itself still deserves care: the small-business deduction holds Ontario's combined rate to about 12.2 percent on the first $500,000, and for most CCPCs the balance is due three months after year-end, well before the return. Our Corporate Tax Filing service closes the year against books that already reconcile to every payroll filing made along the way, which is exactly what a CRA trust exam checks; if one arrives, CRA Audit & Review Support works from the same file.
Source: Ontario — Employer Health Tax (EHT).
