The switching-accountants checklist (it's shorter than you think)

The three things are your last two corporate returns with the notices of assessment that came back, the current state of your GST/HST and payroll accounts, and the bookkeeping file. You sign an engagement letter, approve one CRA authorization from your own account, and that is the hour. Everything after that — the records request, the follow-up, the conversation with the firm you are leaving — belongs to the new accountant.

The awkward part is the part that doesn’t happen. Owners picture a phone call in which they explain themselves. Requesting a client’s prior records is ordinary correspondence between firms, and nobody on the receiving end expects a reason.

The three things worth gathering yourself

A new firm can start from a CRA authorization alone. Pulling these together first shortens the handover, because they are the items most likely to sit somewhere your outgoing accountant never had them.

• The last two T2s, with the notices of assessment. The T2 is the corporation’s income tax return; the notice of assessment is what the CRA sends back once it has processed one. The pair matters more than either alone, because the notice tells you whether the CRA agreed with what was filed.
• Where your GST/HST and payroll accounts actually stand. Filing frequency, the last period filed, whether remittances are current, and any CRA letter you have been not-quite-reading since spring.
• The bookkeeping file, and who controls access to it. On cloud accounting software this is an invitation, not an export. If the books live in a desktop file or a spreadsheet, the useful answer is the name of the person holding the current copy.

Two smaller items save a round trip: the owner’s last personal return, if the same firm prepared it, and where the minute book lives, which is often a lawyer’s office rather than an accountant’s.

The records you never have to ask for

The handoff runs firm to firm. Your new accountant writes to the outgoing one and asks for prior returns and schedules, GST/HST and payroll history, the working papers behind the last filings, and the bookkeeping file, then follows up until it all arrives. You are copied on it or you are not, and either way you never make the call.

Source documents you provided are yours. Working papers — the schedules and calculations behind a return — are generally the preparing firm’s property, and firms differ in how much they hand over. An unpaid invoice can also slow a release, and what a firm may hold back over fees varies by province.

None of that is fatal to the move. Filed returns and CRA account data are enough for a competent firm to rebuild the continuity that matters. Working papers make that work faster; they are not what makes it possible.

Authorization is the only part that has to be you

Representative authorization gives your new firm access to your CRA accounts: the corporation’s income tax account, GST/HST, payroll, and your personal account when the owner’s return is in scope. For a corporation the approval is generally done online in My Business Account. The firm submits a request, and it sits in your account until you confirm it.

Authorization is access, not control: it does not move money, sign anything or transfer your file. Adding a new representative does not automatically remove the old one, so revoking prior access is a separate step, available to you whenever you want it.

The mechanics move, though. There is a paper route as well as the online one, and the CRA has changed both the forms and the online flow more than once in recent years. Follow the instruction your new firm gives you this month rather than a set of steps you found in a three-year-old article.

Mid-year is fine; the week of a deadline is not

You can switch in any month. What constrains you is the corporation’s calendar, and that calendar runs on relative dates. The T2 is due six months after year-end — June 30 for a December 31 year-end. The balance of tax owing is generally due earlier: two months after year-end, and three months for many Canadian-controlled private corporations (CCPCs) claiming the small-business deduction. Payroll remittances and GST/HST returns keep their own periods throughout. The full deadline table has the rest.

So the only genuinely bad timing is a filing or a remittance landing inside the transfer window. September, with a December year-end, gives a new firm three months before the year even closes and nine before the return is due. June 20 gives them ten days to file for a year that ended six months ago, using records that have not arrived yet.

A timing myth worth retiring: you do not pay two firms for the same year — the outgoing firm bills for work it has done, and a new one scopes the year from where it picks up. Catch-up work, if the books are behind, is scoped once at the estimate rather than discovered later.

The other myth is that instalments can wait for the dust to settle. They cannot. Corporate instalments run monthly for most corporations, and personal instalments are generally required once net tax owing tops C$3,000 — C$1,800 for Quebec residents — in the current year and in either of the two years before it. Those dates hold regardless of whose name is on the authorization.

What a good firm reads before it files anything for you

A baseline review comes before the first filing, not after it. It means reading the last two returns against what the CRA’s own records say, and checking the balances that carry from one year to the next: undepreciated capital cost by class · non-capital loss carryforwards · the shareholder-loan account · the capital dividend account · the instalment position · GST/HST filing frequency and any elections made along the way. A firm that skips this inherits the previous firm’s assumptions and files on top of them.

An illustrative example, with round numbers. Your corporation has a December 31 year-end and, as an eligible CCPC, pays the 9% federal small-business rate on the first C$500,000 of active business income. Two years ago it lost money: a C$60,000 non-capital loss. Last year it earned C$200,000, and the return as filed applied none of that loss. Applied, it would have brought taxable income to C$140,000 and saved C$5,400 of federal tax — provincial tax sits on top of that and varies by province, so the true figure is larger and is deliberately not in this arithmetic. The loss does not disappear; it carries forward for a period the Act sets, and a filed year can generally be adjusted inside the CRA’s reassessment window. Nobody claims it until somebody reads the old return.

Most baseline reviews find something smaller and duller: an instalment schedule nobody updated after a good year, a GST/HST filing frequency that stopped matching the revenue, a shareholder-loan balance that has been growing quietly for three years. Those are cheap to deal with in August and expensive to discover in June. Which of them applies to your corporation is a question only your actual filings answer — which is why the reading comes before the filing.

What Cadence does

We send the records request, follow it up and reconcile your CRA accounts against your last two returns before we prepare anything — that reconciliation is ordinary CRA support work, and it is part of onboarding rather than a separate project. Your filing calendar, instalment schedule and check-ins start the week you authorize us, not the week the old file lands. The week-by-week version of the switch is on our How We Work page, and the fit and fee estimate takes about five minutes.