Calgary, Alberta
The kind of tax help you’d get from knowing someone.
I’m a one-person tax practice. Personal returns, self-employed and small-business taxes, and CRA letters that need sorting out. You get me on the phone — not a queue, not a different person every spring.
- Personal & small business
- Trades and contract work
- CRA reviews & back-filing
- Same-day callback
Who you’re calling
It’s just me here.
No front desk, no account manager, nobody handing your file to a temp in the second week of April. When you call, you get the person who does the work.
I keep the client list small on purpose. It means I can sit with your return instead of pushing it through, and it means you’re not re-explaining your situation to someone new every year. After a while I just know — the truck, the tools, the year you were laid off, the kid who started school.
What I’m good at is the ordinary stuff done carefully: reading the slips properly, asking the questions that turn up a deduction, and telling you in plain words what I did and why.
What I do
Three kinds of work.
Personal returns
T4s, a couple of slips, maybe some employment expenses. Also the messier years — three employers, a rental suite, a spouse’s return, tuition, a severance, moving for work.
Self-employed & side income
Contract work, a side business, a trade you invoice for. I’ll tell you whether you need to register for GST yet ($30,000 in revenue is the line), what you can actually write off, and roughly what to set aside so June isn’t a shock.
CRA letters & back years
A review asking for receipts, a reassessment you disagree with, a demand to file, or years you never got around to. I’ve read a lot of these. Most are less serious than they sound.
Why it’s worth a phone call
Things people leave on the table.
Not a sales pitch — just three real ones you can look up yourself. Each has conditions, and whether they apply to you is exactly the sort of thing worth fifteen minutes on the phone.
The tradesperson’s tools deduction
Up to $1,000 a year for new tools you bought for the job — doubled from $500 back in 2023, which plenty of people never heard about. It only works if your employer signs a T2200, and only on the cost above that year’s threshold.
The GST rebate on employment expenses
If you’re claiming employment expenses, you can usually claim back the GST you paid on them too. It’s a separate form — GST370 — and it’s the one that quietly gets skipped.
Meals on the road
If you drive for a living, the simplified method is $23 a meal, one meal every four hours away, up to three a day — on a TL2 signed by your employer. Long-haul drivers deduct 80% of it instead of the usual half.
There are more, and they’re boring until they’re yours: union and professional dues, moving 40 km closer to a new job, a vehicle log kept properly, and the home-office rules that changed after 2022 when the flat-rate method ended.
If you’re behind
Two years behind? Five?
This is the part people are most embarrassed about, and it’s the part I least want you to be embarrassed about. It almost always starts the same way — one hard year, then it’s easier not to open the envelope.
Here’s the practical bit. The late-filing penalty is 5% of what you owe plus 1% for every month it sits, up to twelve months — and that clock stops when you file, not when you pay. So getting the old years filed is usually the cheapest thing you can do, even if you can’t pay the balance yet. Payment arrangements are a separate conversation, and a calmer one than people expect.
Call me. I’m not going to lecture you.
How it works
Four steps, no surprises.
You call or email.
Tell me roughly what’s going on. Fifteen minutes, no charge, and nobody calls you back afterwards trying to sell you something.
I tell you the price first.
Before I start, not on the invoice. If it turns out to be more involved than we thought, you hear that from me while there’s still a choice to make.
You send what you’ve got.
Email, photos of a pile on the kitchen table, an envelope dropped off — whatever’s easiest. You don’t need it organized. Sorting it out is the job.
We go through it before it’s filed.
I’ll walk you through what I claimed and why, in plain words. Then it’s filed and you get a copy of everything, including the parts you’d need if the CRA ever asks.
Being straight with you
I’m probably not your guy if…
- You need a big firm’s name on an audited financial statement. That’s a different kind of shop, and I’ll point you to one.
- You want something filed that we both know isn’t true. I’ll find you every dollar you’re entitled to and not one you aren’t — that’s the whole deal.
- It’s the 29th of April and you need it done tonight. Call anyway. Sometimes I can.
Ready when you are
Start with a phone call.
No pressure and no pitch — just tell me what’s going on and I’ll tell you straight whether I can help and what it would cost.
That’s my direct line, not a call centre. If I’m with someone, leave a message — you’ll hear back the same day.