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Business Context
The business started as a single store in Ontario. Over four years, it expanded to 12 locations across three provinces. The GST/HST filing process never changed. It was still being run the way it was when there was only one store to worry about, one person, one spreadsheet, one filing routine, now stretched across three very different tax jurisdictions.
- › Canadian retail chain, 12 store locations
- › Operating across Ontario, British Columbia, and Alberta
- › ~$8M in annual revenue
- › GST/HST filings handled in-house by one bookkeeper
Challenge Faced by the Clients
- As the business grew, the tax process quietly fell behind it.
- Ontario, BC, and Alberta each have different tax rules, but every location was coded the same way
- Input tax credits were being missed or calculated incorrectly across multiple stores
- Filings were submitted late twice within a single year, resulting in CRA interest charges
- There was no single view of what the business owed across all three provinces at any given time
Solution
Solution Provided by Aone Outsourcing Solutions
- Aone Outsourcing rebuilt the client's GST/HST process from the source, not just the filings:
- Audited two years of prior filings, location by location, to find missed or miscalculated input tax credits
- Set up province-specific tax coding rules directly at the point of transaction entry, not at filing time
- Reconciled GST/HST payable against actual sales and purchase data every month, not just before filing
- Built one consolidated dashboard showing liability across all three provinces in real time
- Moved filings to a fixed monthly schedule and took over direct CRA correspondence
Impact
Zero CRA reassessments in the 12 months following the rebuild
100% on-time filings, up from 2 missed deadlines the prior year
$34,000 in previously missed input tax credits recovered
CRA interest and penalty charges eliminated
Real-time visibility into GST/HST liability across all three provinces, for the first time
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The errors weren't about effort — they came from a process that never scaled past one location. Once tax coding was corrected at the source and filings moved to a fixed monthly schedule, the reassessments stopped, the penalties disappeared, and the client recovered money they didn't know they'd overpaid.
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