GST and Why do you charge it?

Goods and Sales Tax; why and when do we start adding a "GST" line to our invoice? When do we account for the amount of GST we have charged in a tax year? GST only becomes something that we need to add to our invoices when we transition from a small business and start becoming a larger, more regular stream of income. Here we are talking about making more than $30,000 in a calendar year (in a tax season). Once you start making more than 30k/year you can start charging GST. You could start before hitting this milestone, but it is not necessary as you would pay out GST back to the government that is not necessary. When we start charging GST we need to get a GST Number, this you can recieve through your CRA 'My Account' and it will be added as another sole proprieter/personal number or a new Business number. Here, once you add your Locum Business, the CRA will give you a new 9 digit business number. A number that you will also put at the top of you invoices so businesses charged can see that you are registered for tax purposes. The number that you will place on your Invoice will begin with RT0001 and then follow your unique 9 digits for you account. The RT stands for Goods and Sales Tax.

Now with this registered number, each tax season you will not only report all of your income and GST charged, but you will now also separately report GST charged and collected under "GST" and RT000 Payments. This is an amount you pay back to the government on tax charged once a year. Now that you have added another expense to your tax season, it is best to try and keep track of what that bill will look prior to tax season. We suggest keeping track using one of our Tax Season Templates in Excel, which you will be able to find on the platform

in the file share.