Illustrative scenario: an Ottawa niche practice with year-ends in every month
An Ottawa practice serving about 80 professional corporations has no corporate season, because every month is one. The T2 is due six months after each corporation's fiscal year-end, and the balance of tax is due earlier — generally three months after year-end for a CCPC claiming the small business deduction.
The firm in this scenario
An archetype, not a client. The figures below describe the shape of the practice being modelled — they are inputs to the scenario, never results.
| Attribute | Detail |
|---|---|
| Archetype | Niche practice serving physician professional corporations |
| Location | Ottawa, Ontario |
| Firm size | Three staff |
| Client profile | Around 80 professional corporations with fiscal year-ends spread across the calendar |
- Fiscal-year-end reminders
- Task Master
- SLA dashboard
- Client CRM
The problem
With year-ends spread across twelve months, a filing is always due and none of them cluster helpfully. The prep trigger — roughly a month before year-end — was tracked by memory, which works until the month someone is away.
The two clocks make it worse. A file filed inside six months can still be late on payment, because the balance was due months earlier.
The workflow, step by step
- 1
Store the fiscal year-end on the client
Year-end is a property of the client record, which makes it something the system can compute from rather than something staff look up.
Client CRM
- 2
Trigger at year-end minus one month
A reminder fires ahead of each client's year-end so document requests go out before the books close, not after.
Fiscal-year-end-aware reminders
- 3
Open the T2 project on the trigger
Prep, review and file stages are created with owners at the moment the trigger fires, so the file exists before the client calls.
Task Master projects
- 4
Track both clocks per file
The six-month filing date and the earlier balance-due date are separate checkpoints on the same board, because meeting one does not mean meeting the other.
SLA dashboard
What this changes
Practices with staggered year-ends typically stop experiencing surprise year-ends. The minus-one-month trigger fires whether or not anyone remembered the client, and the payment clock stops being the one nobody was watching.
About this scenario
Related reading
Where this applies
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