How to take money out of the company
(salary, dividends, or both)
Services
Tax planning & advisory
Planning ahead of time, not a surprise at tax time. Salary vs dividend, retained earnings, upcoming decisions, all reviewed with your goals in mind.
Book a Discovery Session
What it is
What is tax planning?
Tax planning is the difference between filing taxes and managing them. Filing is reactive, you record what already happened. Planning is proactive, you make decisions ahead of time that shape what happens during the year.
Common planning levers for incorporated business owners
When to recognize income or expenses
Whether to keep retained earnings inside the corporation or move them out
When to bring in a holding company or restructure the corporate setup
How to time asset purchases
How to position the business for an eventual sale
These decisions may affect tax outcomes by tens of thousands of dollars annually. They're made in planning meetings with your accountant, when there's still time to act.
What we do
Tax planning & advisory services
Tax planning is built around strategy, not forms. Here is the work that goes into making decisions that actually move the needle on what you pay each year.
-
Annual tax planning review
Pre-year-end meeting to project income, review options, and lock in decisions before December 31.
-
Salary vs dividend optimization
Annual analysis of the optimal mix for your situation, factoring in CPP, RRSP room, personal cash flow needs, corporate tax rates, and your personal goals, retirement timing, family situation, and lifestyle plans can shift what optimal means significantly.
-
Retained earnings strategy
Decisions on holding retained earnings inside the corporation versus distributing them, including consideration of passive income rules.
-
Decision support throughout the year
When you're considering a major purchase, hire, contract, or business change, you have someone to call who already knows your situation.
Who
Who this is for
Tax planning pays off when there is something to plan around: profitability, growth, succession, or major life changes. The questions below are the ones our clients bring to us most often.
Profitable incorporated businesses
The bigger the gap between your business's net profit and what you personally need to live on, the more sense tax planning starts to make. Profit that stays inside the corporation creates planning opportunities that don't exist when everything goes straight out as compensation.
Are you planning to sell your business?
Exit planning is multi-year work. Capital gains exemption, asset vs share sale, restructuring before sale, all these decisions need to start years before the actual transaction. The corporate tax filings of the years leading up to the sale matter as much as the sale itself.
Do you plan to pass the business to your children?
Family transitions can be tax-efficient or extremely costly, depending on how the structure is set up years before the transfer.
Should you invest inside the corporation?
Passive income inside a corporation has different tax rules than personal investments. Whether to invest corporate retained earnings or distribute them first depends on your tax bracket, investment horizon, and how much active income the corporation generates.
Your registered accounts are maxed out, what now?
Once RRSP, TFSA, and other registered room is full, what do you do with the money that keeps coming in? The answer depends on whether you have a corporation, what's inside it, and how the corporate and personal sides interact.
What if you leave Canada?
Departure tax, deemed disposition of assets, treaty benefits, ongoing Canadian-source income, leaving Canada has tax consequences that need to be planned years ahead, not in the final months before the move. Personal tax filings in the year of departure require careful coordination.
Ready to plan, not just file?
Book a 30-minute discovery session. No cost, no commitment.
Book a discovery session