How do you catch up corporate tax when the books are a mess?

You do not start with the T2. You start with a set of books the T2 can sit on. A messy catch-up is a bookkeeping job first and a tax job second. The usual raw material is the business bank account, the credit card, the sales invoices, the HST you charged, and a list of everything the shareholder paid personally. From that we build a trial balance, then financial statements, then the T2. Skipping straight to “just file an estimate” is how companies get assessed on deposits that were shareholder loans or transfers between their own accounts.

Each fiscal year is its own set of statements. A company that is four years behind needs four closing balances that connect. The shareholder loan at the end of year one is the opening balance of year two. If that number is wrong, every later T2 is wrong, and section 15(2) can pull an unpaid shareholder loan into the shareholder’s personal income.

What “messy” still has to produce

We can work with imperfect records. We cannot work with a shrug. This is the minimum that makes a year signable.

• Bank and credit-card statements for the full year, in PDF, not screenshots of a balance.
• Sales invoices or a sales report, and the deposits that do not match them.
• A note of personal expenses paid by the company, and company expenses paid by the shareholder.
• The HST account: collected, input tax credits you can support, and periods already filed.
• Payroll, if anyone was paid: T4s, remittances, and the periods that were skipped.
• Last year’s return, if one exists. It is the opening balance, not a souvenir.

How the quote works

The corporate package is $2,000 plus HST when the year is ready: statements done, HST supportable, T2 prepared. A mess is not that file. Tax Everyday quotes the bookkeeping catch-up and the T2 together, so you are not surprised by a second invoice. Book a time and bring one year of statements if you want a realistic range before you upload four years of PDFs.

If CRA has already demanded a year, say so in the first message. The quote does not matter if the deadline is this Friday and the bank export takes a week.