A year-end checklist for a Halifax business isn’t really about December 31 itself. The paperwork that actually has a deadline lands in January, February and March: T4 slips, your HST return, and keeping Workers’ Compensation Board reporting square. None of it is complicated on its own. The trouble is doing all three at once in the new year while you’re also trying to open the books for 2027. Start on it now, while the year is still open, and you’re looking at a few quiet afternoons instead of a January scramble.

Why the Real Deadlines Land After the Year Ends

Nothing is actually due on December 31. What locks in that day is the number itself: everything you paid employees, everything you collected and remitted in HST, everything on your payroll for Workers’ Compensation Board purposes. Once the year closes, that number stops moving, and three separate clocks start running against it. None of the three deadlines is close enough together to ignore, and none of them is far enough away to put off until it’s actually due. A T4 slip filed a few days late costs real money even with no employee affected at all, and the same goes for a late HST return or a WCB report that gets estimated instead of reported. The cheapest time to deal with any of this is now, while the records are still fresh and nobody is waiting on you.

Getting Your T4 and T4A Slips Right

T4 slips report what you paid an employee during the year to the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA), the federal tax agency, and a T4A covers certain other payments, like fees to someone who isn’t on payroll. Both are due on the last day of February the year after the one you’re reporting, so your 2026 slips are due by the last day of February 2027. If that date lands on a weekend, the CRA treats the next business day as on time. If you haven’t set up a CRA payroll account yet, I walked through that step, along with WCB Nova Scotia registration, in my post on what to sort out before hiring your first employee in Nova Scotia.

The penalty for being late adds up faster than most owners expect for something that’s really just a printing job once your payroll records are straight. Under the CRA’s own relief policy for small filers, being a few days late with one to five slips carries a flat $100 penalty. Six to ten late slips run $5 a day, up to $500. A business with a handful of staff can hit that ceiling over a long weekend without anyone noticing until the notice arrives.

Do You Need to File a T5018 for Subcontractors Too?

If construction makes up more than half of what your business actually does, and you paid a Canadian-resident subcontractor more than $500 in the year, not counting HST, the CRA wants a T5018 slip for that subcontractor on the same last-day-of-February clock as your T4s. A renovation contractor out of Burnside who brought in an electrician and a drywaller for a few jobs this year needs both names and business numbers ready well ahead of the deadline, not dug up the week of. A business where construction isn’t the main line of work doesn’t need to worry about this one at all.

Your HST Return Runs on Its Own Clock

HST filing deadlines don’t follow the calendar year the way T4s do. They follow whatever reporting period the CRA assigned you when you registered, which I covered in my post on registering for GST/HST in Nova Scotia. Monthly and quarterly filers have both the return and the payment due one month after the reporting period ends. Annual filers with a December 31 year-end who aren’t a sole proprietor, meaning most corporations, have until the end of March. A sole proprietor reporting real business income gets more room on the filing itself, due June 15, though the payment is still due by April 30. Check which one actually applies to you in your CRA My Business Account rather than assuming it’s the same as last year, especially if your sales crossed a threshold or you changed how the business is structured.

Keep Your WCB Nova Scotia Reporting Square Before the Year Rolls Over

Workers’ Compensation Board of Nova Scotia (WCB Nova Scotia), the provincial workplace injury insurance program, works differently than T4s or HST. There’s no single annual filing day. Instead, you report your actual payroll each period, monthly or quarterly depending on how you’re set up, due by the 15th of the month after that period ends. Miss a report and WCB estimates your payroll for you and bills on that estimate, with interest and penalties on anything paid late. So the real year-end job here isn’t a separate filing. It’s going back through this year’s periods and confirming every one of them actually reflects your real payroll rather than an estimate sitting unresolved, before you roll into a new year with the gap still open.

Your Business Registration Isn’t a Year-End Job, But Check It Anyway

Your Nova Scotia business or non-profit registration renews every year on its own anniversary date through the Registry of Joint Stock Companies, not on the calendar year, which is exactly why it’s easy to let slide while you’re focused on T4s and HST. I covered the actual deadline and the fee by business type in my post on renewing your business registration in Nova Scotia. Worth a two-minute check while you already have your other paperwork open, rather than finding out it lapsed when you need a current registration for something else.

Your Step-by-Step Year-End Checklist

1. Pull your payroll register and reconcile it against what you’ve actually remitted to the CRA all year, before anyone prints a single T4.
2. Confirm every employee’s name, SIN and address on file is current, including anyone who started or left partway through the year.
3. If construction is your main line of work, list every subcontractor paid more than $500 this year and get their legal name and business number ready for a T5018.
4. Log into CRA My Business Account and confirm your actual HST reporting frequency and deadline, rather than assuming it matches last year.
5. Check your WCB Nova Scotia account and confirm every period this year shows your real payroll, not an estimate sitting unresolved.
6. Pull up your business or non-profit registration and note its renewal date, since it runs on its own schedule, not the calendar year.
7. Set one afternoon in January on the calendar to actually do this, and tell your bookkeeper or accountant now rather than in the new year.

What This Actually Costs You

Mostly time, not money. An afternoon reconciling payroll, an hour pulling subcontractor information, a few minutes checking a renewal date. The money only shows up if you miss something: that $100 flat penalty for a few late T4 slips, or WCB interest and penalties stacking onto a late report. Even that is cheaper than untangling it after the fact, when the records you need are harder to pull together than they are right now, with the year still open in front of you.

The Bottom Line

This isn’t exciting work, and it isn’t hard once you know what’s actually due and when. Clear a few afternoons over the next several weeks and January turns into opening a new year’s books, not digging through last year’s. The owners who get hit with a penalty are rarely the disorganized ones. They’re the ones who assumed someone else, or next month, would sort it out, and ran out of month. For more on running a business here, including what changes when you add staff or register a new venture, the Halifax Business Blog has other posts worth a look.

Your commercial policy is probably watching the same numbers you just squared away for WCB and your T4s. If your payroll or revenue moved by a lot in 2026, it’s worth flagging before an audit or your renewal catches the gap on its own.

About the author. Rayanur Rahman writes about running and growing a business in Halifax. He is a commercial insurance broker with Western Financial Group in Bedford, Nova Scotia, and works with businesses of every kind across the Halifax Regional Municipality. Reach him at 902-321-1712 or book a 30 minute call.

Sources: Canada Revenue Agency: When to File Information Returns. Canada Revenue Agency: GST/HST Filing Deadlines. WCB Nova Scotia: Preparing Your Remittance. Canada Revenue Agency: T5018 Slip, Statement of Contract Payments. Photo by Windows on Unsplash. Photo by Ionela Mat on Unsplash. Prices and program details checked November 2026 and can change. General information only.