Agent or principal: the question that sizes your return
As principal, you buy the wedding and resell it. Vendor charges are your costs, the full client invoice is your revenue, you charge 13% HST on every line you bill, and you claim input tax credits for the HST vendors charged you. As agent, you arrange rather than resell: only your planning fee is revenue, the vendor contracts belong to your client, and money you collect and pass straight through is not your supply at all.
CRA weighs the facts, not the branding: whose name is on the venue contract, who is on the hook if a vendor collapses, who can vary the order, and whether you add a markup. A margin buried in a supposed pass-through points hard at principal. The failure mode we fix most often is a contract that says agent while the invoices behave like principal, which leaves the revenue line and the HST return wrong in opposite directions.
The same wedding, billed two ways
| Line | Billed as agent | Billed as principal |
|---|---|---|
| Planning fee | Your revenue, 13% HST. | Your revenue, 13% HST. |
| Venue and catering | Contracted and invoiced in the client's name; outside your return. | Your cost with an ITC, rebilled as your revenue at 13%. |
| Florals and rentals | A disbursement passed through without markup; no HST charged by you. | Your revenue, margin included, at 13%. |
| Revenue on the HST return | Your fees only. | The full event budget. |
| Registration pressure | Small-supplier room can last a while. | A single full-service event can use most of it. |
Neither model is wrong, and mixed models inside one business are common: principal on the decor you own and rent out, agent on the venue and caterer. A planner who has built a rental inventory of arches, linens and candle collections is unambiguously principal on that revenue, charging 13% on every rental and claiming ITCs when the pieces were bought. What survives a review is consistency, meaning the contract wording, the invoice format and the return all give the same answer on every event, all season long.
Registration and the numbers CRA cross-checks
The small-supplier threshold is $30,000 of taxable revenue over four rolling calendar quarters. A fee-only planner can sit under it for a season or two; a principal-model planner running whole event budgets through her invoice crosses it almost immediately, because wedding budgets routinely exceed the entire threshold on their own. The crossing mechanics matter too: blow through $30,000 inside a single calendar quarter and you must charge HST starting with the very sale that put you over, with no grace period. Registering early is often the better move anyway, since it recovers the HST on software, equipment and startup costs, and it spares you explaining to a booked couple why tax just appeared on their final instalment.
Once registered, remember that line 101 of the HST return reports your total revenue, and CRA compares it against the revenue on your T2 or T1. A planner who files fee-only revenue on one return and gross event budgets on the other has built the mismatch that generates review letters. We also keep the February slip run on schedule, because T4A slips for day-of contractors are due by the last day of the month; the classification work behind them lives with our event planner accounting.
The T2, the T1 and a year-end that fits the season
An incorporated planner chooses her own fiscal year-end, and the smart choice sits just after the season: a December 31 or January 31 year-end closes the books once the last galas and holiday parties are delivered, and puts the year-end work in the months when your calendar is quiet. The T2 is due six months after year-end, but the balance for a small CCPC claiming the small business deduction is due in three, which we diarize rather than discover. We prepare the return through Corporate Tax Filing, from books where deferred retainers and vendor advances already sit in the right periods.
Sole-proprietor planners report on the T1 instead: the self-employment filing deadline is June 15, but any balance owing is due April 30, a trap that catches first-year planners annually. We file those through Personal Tax Filing, and if any filed return draws a letter, CRA Audit & Review Support answers it from working papers that already tie each number to a contract.
Source: CRA — GST/HST for businesses.
