Our recent webinar, led by Warren Juteau-Peall and Christine McIntyre at PayEvo, provided an in-depth guide to ensure your T4 submissions are accurate and compliant.
Here’s what our experts shared and what you need to know to prepare, generate and submit your T4s in 2024:
Before Running Your T4s
Understanding Your YTD Summary:
As you prepare to run your T4s, understanding your Year-to-Date (YTD) Summary and Journal is crucial. These reports, as Christine McIntyre explained, should typically match and serve as a comprehensive record of your payroll activities for the year.
Discrepancies might occur, especially if you’ve joined PayEvo mid-year or made manual adjustments, highlighting the importance of thorough review.
Additionally, ensuring all employee addresses are recorded and correct is not just a step but a necessity to avoid delays in the T4 process.
Key Steps in Running Your T4s
“You can do it in less than 10 minutes, we want to show you that our process is as simple as it can be..”
Warren Juteau-Peall
- Generating T4s begins with navigating to the Year End actions in PayEvo, where you can review YTD information. This step is vital for visualizing how data will appear on the T4 slips, ensuring accuracy before proceeding.
- Manual Adjustments: Adding or editing an employee’s address, and updating amounts directly on the grid if needed, are crucial steps to ensure accuracy.
- Dental Benefits become a focal point, with a new box introduced for the year to address government mandates regarding dental benefits for children under 12. This step is about what your company offers in terms of benefits as of December 31, not what benefits employees choose to use. Selecting the correct code based on what was offered to employees—individual coverage (Code 2), family coverage (Code 3), or none at all (Code 1)—is imperative.
- Addressing Errors and Omissions involves a detailed review of each employee’s information on the T4 grid. This is where you can correct addresses, affecting both the T4 slip and the employee’s profile. It’s also an opportunity to manually adjust details of individual circumstances, ensuring each slip reflects the correct information.
- Completing the Submission: Total deductions are calculated considering all manual changes. For the amount received by CRA, it’s key to understand why this isn’t prefilled and requires your input.
Submission Options: Choosing the Best Path
Christine McIntyre outlined three primary options for submitting your T4 slips to the CRA, with a note that businesses who need to file more than T4s must submit electronically moving forward:
- Automatic Submission: This option allows you to securely transmit your T4 slips and summary directly from PaymentEvolution to the CRA, with confirmation of acceptance or rejection typically within one business day.
- Online Submission: This method involves downloading an XML file and uploading it to your CRA account, offering a hands-on approach for those who prefer to manage the submission process directly.
- Manual Submission: Applicable to businesses with five or fewer employees, this option entails printing and mailing the T4 slips to the CRA. It’s crucial to note that slips must be postmarked by the last day of February to avoid penalties and late fees.
You can follow our guide below, step-by-step to submit your T4s in less than 10 minutes.
Emphasizing Accuracy and Compliance
Throughout the webinar, Christine emphasized the importance of accuracy in every step of the T4 preparation and submission process.
From ensuring that your YTD summaries are up-to-date and accurately reflect all payroll activities to selecting the correct codes for dental benefits and addressing any missing employee information, each step is designed to streamline the year-end payroll process and ensure compliance with CRA requirements.
This detailed approach to preparing and submitting T4 slips, as outlined in the webinar, underscores PayEvo’s commitment to providing Canadian businesses with the tools and knowledge needed to navigate the complexities of payroll management effectively.
Q&A Highlights
The webinar concluded with a valuable Q&A session. Key questions included discrepancies between YTD Summaries and Journals, clarifications on dental benefit codes, and procedures for adding slips for past employees or amending submissions.
Clarifications on Dental Benefits: It’s not about what benefits employees receive but what they are offered and their eligibility as of December 31, 2023. Understanding how to select the correct codes here is crucial.
Adding a Slip for Past Employees: If an employee left before joining PaymentEvolution, it’s still possible and necessary to issue a T4 slip through the platform.
Am I able to do manual submissions as my external accounting firm makes our submissions?
Ultimately, if you’re submitting it yourself, you can choose either option. The reason we say to select the option you’re actually doing -whether it’s online or manual-is because that’s what will be reflected in your account.
If you choose online submission, our system will say that your documents were submitted on X day alongside a confirmation number. If your accounting firm does your submission for you, that’s totally fine, just see what they require.
-Warren
What is the cost of automatic submission?
The cost of automatic submission is $20 per submission. It’s important to note here that the cost is $20 per submission, not per slip. When you submit T4s, they are sent as one package. Whether you’re submitting five slips or 100 slips, it’s the same cost.
Amendments and resubmissions count as additional submissions that again incur the $20 fee. The same rules stand for T4A and RL-1 automatic submissions as well.
-Warren
Once submitted, will T4s go to the employee’s emails?
Your team will get an email from PayEvo indicating that tax slips are available in their Paychequer account. They will get the notification, but the slips have to be downloaded through our employee self-service portal, Paychequer.
How to file T4As?
The process is very similar to submitting T4s. If you need to submit T4As or RL-1s because you have employees who work in Quebec or contractors paid in 2023, the options will be available on your year-end checklist.
You can reference our help articles for T4As and RL-1s for help submitting.
-Christine
Dental boxes – what’s the deal?
The Dental Benefit was created for the Federal Government. Now they want to know who qualified and who was exempt. For example, if your company has a person working for them, and they offer benefits to their employees, we want to know the highest benefit that you provide. If you provide family benefits to your employees, but you have people who only use single benefits, or employees who don’t use benefits at all, they are exempt.
The government is really after what benefit did you offer to your employees on December 31. It doesn’t matter if they had spouses or kids, but what did your company provide to your employees.
If you didn’t provide any benefits, choose the code 1 that they were not eligible for on December 31. If you offered family benefits on the highest level, you would use our code three – this doesn’t mean that your employees took the family benefits, only that they were provided.
Read more on the dental benefit here and how to use our pop-up box with PayEvo here.
-Christine
Why is the amount in box 14 different from the total earnings in YTD?
That could be your taxable benefits, among a host of different reasons. Some earnings are insurable and non-insurable, so that would depend as well on when considering what was calculated for that box.
-Christine
Can we just put zeros for the SIN if we don’t have it?
If you don’t have a current SIN, the recommendation from the CRA is to enter zeros. However, later down the road, I have seen where CRA comes back and fines companies for that. You should make a reattempt to get the actual SIN, and if you don’t have it, keep all of your records of instances when you’re trying to get a SIN.
If it’s for the sole proprietor SIN, you can leave that blank and it will be generally accepted by CRA.
-Christine
Takeaways
Preparing for year-end demands attention to detail and an understanding of CRA requirements. Our webinar aimed to clarify the process, providing step-by-step guidance on preparing, running, and submitting your T4s.
Whether you’re addressing employee information, adjusting payroll amounts, or choosing a submission method, PaymentEvolution is here to support Canadian businesses every step of the way.
Additional Resources
CRA’s T4 Slip Preparation Guide
The Canada Revenue Agency provides an official guide for preparing T4 slips and summaries, including eligibility criteria, filing deadlines, and code explanations. Read the CRA Guide
PaymentEvolution Support Center
A comprehensive resource hub offering detailed guides, FAQs, and how-to articles on payroll management, T4 submissions, and more. Visit the Support Center
