CRA My Business Account: How to Use It & Save Time

For those of you that have had to call Revenue Canada and experience the joy of waiting for several hours to get a response to your queries, there is actually an easier way. And this is CRA's my business account. And this is particularly useful and essential for incorporated business owners and those of you that are registered for GST and HST regardless of whether you are incorporated. So in this tutorial I am going to explain why you should register for CRA My Business Account and then I will show you how to navigate the interface. My name is Ronica Canna. I am a cpa, a CFA and the founder of Montreal Financial where you can find lots of resources for small businesses and I encourage you to sign up to my newsletter. Okay so as mentioned, if you are an incorporated business owner or if you are unincorporated, a sole proprietorship, a partnership, and are registered for sales taxes, it is pretty much essential that you register for CRA's My Business account. And the reason that you want to register is because all of your tax obligations are available on CRA's My Business account. You can see the status of your obligations and you can also file some returns. You can make payments. You can sign up for direct deposit. There are a variety of things that you can do on My Business account. Additionally, you can retrieve all of your mail and Revenue Canada has implemented new rules where most mail will only be available online. So so that is another reason that you must register. You can also if you are ever audited or if they ever ask you for information, hopefully not. But in case that ever happens, you can respond directly through CRA My Business Account by using the case number on the letter that you receive. You can set up your accountant or authorize your accountant to access the account directly. So this can save you a lot of time rather than having to pull pull out the information yourself and send it over. Your accountant can get what they need directly from your account. You also have access to your business numbers and tax slips you can do, if you do your own filings, your T4s and your T5s. These can also be done through My business account. And finally, it is very useful in helping you to avoid interest penalties and nasty letters from the government. Okay, so let's take a look at my business account and I will give you some tips on how to navigate the account. If you have not registered for CRA My Business Account yet, simply type it into Google and then click on Register. The registration process is fairly straightforward. Decide if you need to register. If you're already registered for CRA My Account, which is for individuals. You might simply be able to add your business and not have to wait for the security code. And then finally you'll have the option to sign in with a sign in partner, which is a bank essentially. Or you can have your own user ID and password and the sign in partner. You already have your username and password, so it makes it a little easier. But if you're okay with just simply creating a document and saving your user ID and password, you could use this. This is the method that I use. And once done and once you're registered, then you will get access to an interface which will have all of your business tax obligations. So now let's take a look at that. Okay, so I have logged in to cra, my business account account. As I'm an accountant, I have logged in through my represent a client portal. If you are simply a business owner, the interface will look almost exactly the same. It will have the name of your business, your business number, and the business number is really, really important. This is exactly where you find it. And these are the first nine digits of your business number. Now this is actually really useful to know whenever you get a document from Revenue Canada, to know what file it belongs to actually, or in other words, what tax type it is. Every document that you receive from Revenue Canada that relates to your business will have these nine digits on it. Then there will be two letters and then four more digits, generally triple zero, one or two. And those letters refer to in order rt, as in tom is gsthst. So it'll be these nine digits followed by RT and usually triple zero one. But it could be two or three depending on how many businesses that you've had. The second number will be again the first nine digits, followed by rp, as in peter, triple zero, one or two, et cetera. And for corporation income tax, it will be rc, as in cello. So rc, triple zero, one or two, et cetera. So again you have your nine digits plus rt, rp, rc. Now the final one is referred to as rz and this relates to dividends.

So when you are on this interface again, you will see some of these or all of these. If you are a sole proprietorship or a partnership, you will only see gst, HST and payroll if you have employees. If you are a corporation, you will have corporation income tax and you will have information returns as well. So here you have a little summary of everything and it says there are no outstanding returns. If there are any. It will indicate that here. It will also tell you if you have any prior or previous balances owing. It will give you a list of transactions that have been deposited by a direct deposit if you were signed up. And then here you have a filing and balance confirmation and you would click on this if you needed confirmation that your returns have been filed and that the balance owing is zero. So sometimes a bank or a third party will want this type of confirmation. So now you could go to your profile. So here in your profile you have all of the information relating to your profile. Addresses, phone numbers, notification preferences, your program accounts and your language preferences.

So now we can just go back to my business account. Okay, so now if we scroll down you can either go to GSTHC Payroll Corporation Income Tax on the left hand side or you can see the status of your individual tax accounts over here. And I encourage you to watch my video. I'll leave a link on the types of corporation tax obligations. There are up to four tax obligations that every corporation has and it is useful to know them. Gsthst, Payroll Corporation Income Tax and Dividend declarations. Here we can see that everything is at zero. This is a good situation. This client is totally up to date and so nothing has to be done. If something does have to be done, it will be reflected here. It will say yes and it will give you a little more information. Also, if there's an amount owing, there is an opportunity to click on this and pay your account balance.

Now your correspondence, all of the mail that you receive from Revenue Canada is over here and this includes the statement of account for your payroll deductions, carbon rebates for businesses. You will also have your GST HST Notice of Assessment, your Corporation Notice of Assessment. Anything that Revenue Canada has sent you by mail will appear in this mail section and you can simply click on it, click on the PDF here and download it and save it to your accounting folder and review it and make sure that there's nothing that you have to do. So in addition to that, let's take a look at this. Submit documents. Submit documents is where if you were being audited or Revenue Canada had asked you for some more information, they will send you a letter and on that letter will be a case number and with that you can actually submit documents directly through this portal. So you would click on this and then follow the different steps. Now let's just take a look at some other things you can do. Let's go to Gsthst. Going to click on RT0001. Sometimes you'll have another one here which means you have a second business and Maybe the first business is closed or has been amalgamated and therefore they are just showing you the information for that business. Okay, so if we click on RT001, you will see the returns that are due. And this has an annual filing period. It is due by March 31st. And then they're also showing this year's return which is due in 2026. I can look at my account balances and if I scroll down, you can see that nothing is owing. I can further click over here.

And see how much I paid, what the notices of assessment were, and all of this other information that that can be useful especially when you're trying to reconcile your accounts or figure out when you paid something or what a payment relates to. You can look at your account transaction. So everything that has gone through just the same interface, it'll take you to the same interface that I showed you before. And you can also see your interest amounts. So if I click on this and I click on View, there is no interest charged. In your case there might be depending on if you relate. If you're installment payments for late, there's all kinds of reasons that CRA charges interest and that should come as no surprise to anybody. Now if you scroll down, you'll have some history here of filed returns. You can see the return details. Again, this is useful to have to save as a PDF in your accounting folder so you can see what you actually put on your returns if you ever need to refer back to them or or reconcile them. And you can actually adjust a return. And this is very interesting. If you have made a mistake, you can go and then go through this.

Process and adjust the return and go through the steps. So rather than mailing in a whole other return, which can be a huge pain, this is much easier. So we are going to return to the homepage. So similarly, everything that I showed you, the GSTHST applies to payroll. We click here. Viewing paid account balance, you can request a refund or transfer misallocated payment. And this means sometimes you'll make a payment but it goes to the wrong tax account. It might go to GSTHST instead of payroll or corporation income tax. And here you can actually click on this and get them to reallocate it to the correct place. So in addition to what's on the GST.

Interface, you will also see that you have these other options.

And these options include returns. So you can actually request download, you can get your T4s and you can file a return directly through here through web forms. If you want to file your T4 return.

You have your remittances here.

And this will be your monthly remittances. It will tell you what your requirements are. And on the right hand side you can respond to note notices. You can request rulings for the status of a worker if you want. If you're not sure whether to charge them CPP or ei, this is where you would go. Sometimes you over contribute to CPP or EI. Certain employees do not have to pay EI, such as owners of corporations. If you owe 40% or more of a corporation, you. You do not have to pay ei. You can request a relief of penalties of interest. You have to have a really good reason for doing this. But this is the place where you would do that and you might want to file a formal dispute. And finally you can close your payroll account from here.

Now if we go to corporation income tax again we have previous returns that have been filed, the assessment dates, any special elections, sred. So this is scientific research and development. And if you had applied for it, this will show up here. You can also calculate any installment payments that you might owe on your corporate taxes. Then if we go back to corporation income tax, really you have on the right hand side you can see the progress tracker returns that have been submitted. You have an inquiry service. So this is super useful if you don't want to wait online for hours. Sometimes you have to call and there's really no getting around that. But you can at least try here, especially when it relates to requesting a payment or a refund. And you can also look at, you can request remittance, vouchers, etc. Customize statements, change your mailing instructions, things that might save you a phone call. You have a self assessment and learning tool and this is very useful if you think you might be eligible for scientific research credits, also referred to as short shred. And if you are eligible, you might be entitled to get a refund which can be substantial. You can also contact an SRED specialist. Finally, you can request relief of penalties of interest just like you can with payroll and gsthst. You can file a formal dispute here and close your corporate income tax account. And then with the information returns.

You can view and pay an account balance. When it comes to information returns, this is usually.

Since these are T5 dividends, this is usually interest and penalties for late filing of the returns. You can also download the ET5s that were submitted and you can look at your reports, any notifications of errors relating to incorrect submissions. And finally and importantly, you can file your T5s directly through this portal. So you click on File Return and it will take you to the same place as we discussed in the payroll section. And you click on Start and then you go through the process of of filing your T5 dividend returns. If you do them yourself, there's a good chance that your accountant will do them. I also have a book on how to do your own dividend declarations. It is called Small Business and your Dividends. And it takes you step by step through the process and also gives you some information on whether you should take salaries or dividends. And it also gives you all kinds of other useful information on owner compensation, salaries versus dividends, etc. And then there are some other.

Menu items that you can go through, a ton of useful information that you can sort of dive into, see what's available. And this is again, I think really important even if you have an accountant, because you should know what your business obligations are. You should know what's available, you should know what has been filed, what hasn't been filed, potentially what is late, if you have penalties or interest, and all of the other features that are available here. And again, it can save you hours of time, frustration headaches of dealing with a CRA agent because so much information is available right in this interface. So I hope this was helpful. I would love to hear if you are registered for cra, my business account in the comments. And if you're not, why not? And if you found the video useful, please like and subscribe to my channel so you can get notified about future videos. Have a great day.