Every year, Alex—a small business owner—dreaded T4A season.
Her company worked with a rotating cast of coaches, designers, and contractors. Each February, she’d sit down with her bookkeeper and spend days trying to remember:
• Who got paid
• How much they received
• Whether a T4A had ever been issued before
Then she automated the process—and cut T4A prep time by about 80%. Here’s how that transformation happened and how you can borrow the same approach.
The “before” picture: three days of chaos
Alex’s original process looked like this:
1. Export payments from her accounting system
2. Manually filter for “contractors” in a spreadsheet
3. Sort and sum payments by name or email address
4. Realize some contractors were listed under slightly different names
5. Dig through email to find addresses and SINs
6. Ask her bookkeeper to help re-check everything
By the time they were ready to fill in slips, they’d already spent multiple days just preparing data. Neither of them felt confident they’d captured every contractor or avoided every mistake.
Step 1: defining the problem clearly
Instead of just complaining about how painful the process was, Alex and her bookkeeper wrote down what made it so slow:
• Data scattered in multiple places
• No standardized contractor information
• Manual identification of who should get a T4A
• Repetition of the same steps every year
They didn’t start with “We need automation.” They started with “What exactly is going wrong?”
Step 2: centralizing contractor information
The first change was simple but powerful: every new contractor filled out a short onboarding form that captured:
• Legal name or business name
• Address and email
• SIN or business number (where applicable)
• A quick description of the services they’d be providing
Instead of living in random emails, this information went into a single system they could reuse every year.
By the time T4A season arrived, they weren’t chasing basic details—they were already on file.
Step 3: tagging payments correctly all year
Next, Alex asked her bookkeeper to code contractor payments consistently in the accounting system:
• Using specific expense accounts for contractor fees
• Tagging transactions with the contractor’s name or ID
• Keeping business payments separate from personal ones
This meant that at year-end, they could pull a clean report showing “all contractor payments by recipient” instead of filtering line by line.
Step 4: introducing T4ASlip for the heavy lifting
With better data coming in, automation could finally do its job. They brought in T4ASlip to:
• Import contractor profiles and payment data
• Match payments to the right contractor automatically
• Summarize amounts by contractor for the tax year
• Flag missing or inconsistent information
Instead of manually creating a T4A spreadsheet, they let T4ASlip build a T4A-ready view in a few minutes.
The new workflow: less work, more review
Here’s what T4A season looked like after automation:
1. Run a report from the accounting system for the year’s contractor payments
2. Import the report into T4ASlip
3. Review the automatically generated contractor totals
4. Fix only the exceptions (for example, missing address or unexpected amounts)
5. Generate T4A slips and summaries directly from T4ASlip
Total prep time: about half a day instead of three full days—and with much higher confidence in the results.
Where the 80% time savings actually came from
The biggest time wins weren’t magical; they were practical:
• No more rebuilding contractor lists from scratch each year
• No more manual copy-paste from spreadsheets into forms
• No more guessing who counted as a contractor for T4A purposes
• Fewer back-and-forth emails asking contractors for the same information again
Automation didn’t replace judgment; it replaced repetition.
Common questions Alex had (and you might have too)
“Do I still need an accountant?”
Yes. T4ASlip organizes and automates the mechanics, but an accountant is still key for interpreting CRA rules, edge cases, and overall tax strategy.
“What if my data isn’t clean yet?”
You can start where you are. Use T4ASlip to highlight missing or inconsistent data this year, and improve your onboarding and coding process so next year is even smoother.
“Is this only worth it if I have a lot of contractors?”
Even with a modest number of contractors, you save hours—and more importantly, reduce the risk of mistakes or missed slips.
What this means for your business
Alex’s story is typical of many small businesses:
• Contractor-heavy operations
• Limited admin capacity
• A desire to “just have this handled” without becoming a tax specialist
By combining better data habits with a tool like T4ASlip, she turned T4A season from a scramble into a manageable project that fits into a single afternoon.
You can do the same by:
• Standardizing contractor onboarding
• Coding payments clearly all year
• Letting automation generate and organize your T4A data
T4A rules may be complex, but your process doesn’t have to be—and that’s where automation earns its keep.