How To File The T4 Slips in QB Desktop

Hello everyone. Today I am going to walk you through the process of filing your T4s directly through QuickBooks Desktop. And this of course is assuming that you use QuickBooks Desktop to do your periodic payroll. Whether it's monthly or weekly.

The process is actually fairly straightforward and we will go through each step of the process. So let's begin.

The first thing that I recommend that you do is to log into your cra, my business account, to find out the amount of the payroll amounts that you have paid during the year. You can get a total from there and then you can compare it to how much you have pa paid through QuickBooks. It's just an extra check, but it helps to avoid surprises. So let's do that.

So you'll see here this is a CRA interface for my business account and you can see all of the amounts that you've paid. What's outstanding. It's super useful. Everybody should sign up for this service. To find the payroll amounts, simply scroll down. You can go to Payroll here or you can just click on this RP001. It might be 002. Whatever. Whatever your current payroll number is, it will always start with rp. So click on that. And then what I do is click on View and pay account balance.

And here you have the amounts that have the total amounts that have been paid by year. If you click on 2023, you can actually see the details of each payment. So for me, the total is the only thing that is important at this juncture. It is 223-7635 and I want to make sure that this agrees with to what's in QuickBooks. So let's go to QuickBooks. And the way I would determine that is by going to reports employees and payroll and clicking on the T4 summary. You'll see the T4 summary has the total amounts here and it is the total income tax deducted. Because.

The employees here are located in Quebec, there is no CPP or EI premiums. That's actually on the R01 summary. But if you're anywhere else in Canada, you will have some CPP contributions and you will also have EI premiums, assuming that your employees are not also owners of the corporation. If they are owners of the corporation, they are not required to pay EI premiums and that is based on a minimum of 40% ownership. Okay, so now that we have confirmed that this 223-7635 agrees to the deductions paid for 2023, we can go ahead and file the T4s.

So the first step is to click on employees payroll forms and process T force. Your employees will show up here and the first thing you would want to do is check all.

And you'll see for 2023 you have to actually go in and update the dental benefit code. So if your employees have no group insurance or any kind of dental benefits, you would simply put not eligible. Otherwise you will choose one of the other options. So let's click on ok.

And I am going to click on Edit employee details, which QuickBooks Desktop helpfully.

Offers you in this window over here, rather than having to exit and go and enter it in the employee details. So let's click on Employee details and it simply takes you to the employee section here, which you can double click on. Let's go to payroll info and then we are going to select in my case the employees are not eligible. So I'm simply going to select select that and click on ok. And because this employee was let go, it's asking me to enter an ROE code. I'm just going to say no, not necessary.

Now all three of my employees are clicked. The first step, you have to review these. So a quick review is fine. If you've been doing your payroll properly, this shouldn't be an issue. But you just kind of want to make sure that everything looks fine. Fine. You've got your employment income, you should as indicated have EI as if they are not owners.

And you should have EI premiums as well. PPI premiums relate specifically to Quebec. So only if you have a T4 in Quebec will you have this box. It's a Quebec Parental Insurance plan. You have the income tax deducted the Quebec pension plan contributions. If you're anywhere in Canada it would be CPP contributions. And then you have this amount which is the maximum amount on which the CPP or the QPP applies. And then you might have some taxable benefits. In this case we have a use of an automobile which you would have set up through your payroll items. So let's click on next. This all looks good to me. Click on next. Quickly look at everything here. This is all fine. And then we're going to click on this and next there's none left, so I'll click on ok. So my review is complete. If anything looks odd, you should investigate obviously and correct the error. The other thing to keep in mind is, is that you can actually make changes directly here. So if you double click the box and for example the 66,000 was incorrect, you could actually put an amount here and it would Add to this amount or you could deduct an amount, for example. So in some cases you might have some group insurance benefits or taxable benefits that you want to put here. You just have to make sure that you are adding to all the boxes that apply. So automobile benefits, for example, would also go on to employment income. And you'd want to make sure that you deduct the correct QPP contributions. That can get complicated. But it is an available option for something small.

So we're going to click on ok and then the next step is to print your returns. I like to save them as a PDF. You can choose one of these three options and QuickBooks Desktop recommends that you print all three of these. For these purposes I'm just going to click on employee copies where no business number is printed. And this is what you would give to the employees. But I recommend that you print all of these. It takes a couple minutes and that's it. If you click on print, it's going to ask me to save it.

And here it gives you this message that says that you should end up with a total of four copies, which means you're printing each of the copies as indicated. So I'm going to click on OK. And it prints.

It prints two pages because a T4 has two pages. So all of the T4s go into one file. So if you have three T4s or four T4s or however many you have, they'll all be in this file. And T4, the second page are simply the instructions that you would give to your employees. So you might want to print these or you could separate them out and email them to your employees. Let's click on save.

And the printing is now done again. To print the other copies you would choose the employer copies, the CRA copies. Okay. Okay, so now we are going to get to the fun part of this where we E file the returns. So I recommend E filing before emailing and that's something you can do or not do. That's up to you. So let's just go over the E file. So you'll notice here that the E file submission ID is just pre populated and you don't really have to enter anything here which you do have to enter as a transmitter number which is just simply six zeros. This is fine. This is sort of a legacy number. It does not have to be anything specific. And then you would put your information here, your contact information. And if you're filing for sole proprietor then you would want to put the social insurance numbers for the Sole proprietor. So once this is done, now it's going to take me to Revenue Canada's website where I will be able to submit an XML file and we're going to go through that process. But before you do that, you want to make sure that you have what's called a web access code. And the web access code is necessary to.

Enter the portal where you would submit the T force. To get your web access code, simply just type web access code CRA into Google, follow the steps and get your code. In a lot of cases you can just call CRA and ask them to give it to you over the phone. So let's click on send.

And we're going to click on ok this message. See, most people will just click on ok, including myself. We'll just click on ok. Not really read the message, but this is really important and you have to see where your file, the file that you're going to submit is saved. And for me it is saved in OneDrive. And this is the name of the file, T4 slips XML. So it's again very important that you note the location of this because you will need it to attach to the submission. So let's click on ok.

We're going to click on no, because I do not want to fill out a website survey. So it says have your completed XML files determine your filing method. Then we are going to use Internet file transfer in this case.

So here we're going to click on this filing with Internet file transfer.

And then click on Start Internet File transfer. And again you need to have a web access code and you will also need to have the account number, the payroll account number that is associated with the web access code. So if you're filing for yourself, you would have your payroll number. If you're filing on behalf of a client, you would have their payroll number and the associated web access code. So let's click on start the Internet file transfer.

You have this little disclaimer, terms of use. I have my account number. I have a web access code.

And all of this information.

And then you can read all of this. I highly encourage you to read it just so you know what this agreement says and what you're agreeing to. I have read it, so I am just going to click on I agree. Now this is where you have the account number. This is your payroll number. It always ends with RP0001 or 2 or something like that. So you would put that in here along with your web access co.

Okay.

So I entered the web access code and the.

Account number for the payroll. And now it's time to choose the file from your computer. So let's click on that and find the location where it was saved.

And the file will always be named T4 slips XML. And another thing to check is the date. So we are doing this today on the 23rd of February at 7:55pm so that is what you will select. It is an XML file and click on open and it is attached. Once that's done, you certify that the attached return is complete and accurate and then you simply submit the file.

So it's done. You have submitted it online. Congratulations. I like to print this confirmation just in case it is ever asked for. I've never been asked for it, but you never know so it is a good idea to do that.

And once you have saved that, you can just simply click on Close. It will take you back to the screen and you'll notice that it has been reviewed, printed and the E file started on on this date. And then the next step is you can actually email these. It gives you specific instructions to do this and you can follow them and email directly to your to your.

Employees.

Your employees will be required to enter a pass password. QuickBooks generates these passwords automatically and they follow a very specific format. You'll see NAR 11101 1958. So click on OK.

Cancel. But again you can follow this process and this will send each of your employees a secure email. And that's pretty much it. You are done. You are not required to file a T4 summary because CRA does not require them as long as your.

T4 slips are submitted electronically. So that is just one less thing that you have to do. They will automatically take the information that you submitted, submitted, calculated, determine if there's any amounts owing. And now the slips will be available for download by your employees when they're doing their personal tax returns.

So I hope this was helpful. Please subscribe.

And if you have any questions, don't hesitate to leave them in the comments or if you would like to see more videos. I'd love to hear your suggestions. Have a great day.