If your T4A process lives in a patchwork of spreadsheets, email threads, and sticky notes, you’re not alone. Most organizations don’t start with a perfect system—they grow into a mess over a few seasons of “we’ll fix this later.”
The problem is that “later” usually arrives as a stressful February sprint, when you’re trying to figure out who got paid what so you can issue T4A slips on time.
This article walks through how to move from spreadsheet chaos to a simple, sensible structure for contractor payments that makes T4A season much easier.
Why spreadsheets eventually break
Spreadsheets feel flexible and familiar, which is why almost everyone starts there. Over time, though, a few issues show up:
• Multiple versions live in different inboxes and shared drives
• Columns aren’t consistent from year to year
• People overwrite formulas or sort without expanding the full range
• The “master list” of contractors is never quite complete
Spreadsheets can still play a role, but they shouldn’t be your only source of truth when the CRA expects accurate, reconciled T4A reporting.
Step 1: define your “single source of truth”
The first move is to choose where your “official” contractor data will live. For most organizations, that’s one of:
• Your accounting system or general ledger
• A dedicated contractor / HR system
• A compliance tool built for T4As, such as T4ASlip
Whatever you choose, it should be the place you trust most when someone asks, “How much did we pay this contractor in the tax year?”
Step 2: standardize the data you collect
To issue T4A slips smoothly, you need consistent information for each contractor. At minimum, capture:
• Full legal name or business name
• Address
• SIN or business number (as applicable)
• Email address
• Whether they’re an individual or a corporation
• What kind of services they provide
The easiest time to collect this is at the start of the relationship—not three days before the filing deadline. Make it part of your onboarding form or contractor agreement.
Step 3: tag contractor payments correctly
Next, you need a reliable way to know which payments are T4A-related. Common options:
• Use specific expense accounts for contractor fees
• Use tracking categories, classes, or projects in your accounting system
• Tag transactions in a T4A tool like T4ASlip when the contractor is set up
The goal is to avoid scrolling through every single expense at year-end and asking, “Was this one T4A-related or not?”
Step 4: connect payments to people
The heart of your system is the link between:
• Contractor profile (who they are), and
• Payment history (what they were paid)
In a mature setup, you should be able to click a contractor and see:
• All invoices or payouts for the year
• Total paid by tax year
• Any notes about special situations (non-resident, corporate vs individual, etc.)
If you’re still using spreadsheets, you can approximate this by:
• Keeping one master contractor list with unique IDs
• Using those IDs in your payment export to connect rows back to contractors
• Building a pivot table to summarize by contractor and by year
But it’s much easier if your core systems or a tool like T4ASlip handle this mapping for you.
Step 5: create a T4A-ready “contractor payments” view
For T4A season, you want a view that shows, at a glance:
• Contractor name
• Tax ID / business number (if needed)
• Total paid in the tax year
• Type of payments (service fees, commissions, etc.)
• Whether a T4A is required under your rules
In a spreadsheet world, that’s a pivot table with some filters and flags. In T4ASlip, it’s the dashboard where you see who’s T4A-eligible and whether you’ve collected all required information.
Step 6: bake this into your regular workflow
The magic happens when organizing contractor payments stops being a once-a-year event and becomes part of how you work month-to-month.
A simple pattern:
• When you onboard a contractor → create their record and collect tax info
• When you make a payment → code it as a contractor payment in the right place
• Once a quarter → run a quick check to make sure totals and contractor info look reasonable
By the time year-end hits, you’re reviewing clean data rather than rebuilding it from scratch.
What “sanity” looks like at T4A time
When you’ve moved beyond spreadsheet chaos, T4A season feels more like this:
• You run a report or open your T4A tool
• You see a list of contractors with totals and status (complete/incomplete)
• You fix a few missing items
• You generate slips, review them, and file
There’s still work to do, but it’s controlled, predictable, and repeatable.
How T4ASlip helps you get there
T4ASlip is designed to be that bridge from “everything lives in a spreadsheet” to “we have a clean, T4A-ready system.” It can:
• Centralize contractor profiles and tax info
• Pull in payment data from your existing tools
• Match payments to contractors and summarize by year
• Highlight missing data before you’re ready to file
• Generate T4A slips and summaries in a repeatable way
You don’t have to throw away your spreadsheets overnight. But by giving yourself a real system for contractor payments, you’ll make every future T4A season calmer than the last.