Payroll

Argo Books includes a payroll engine for Canadian employers. Add your employees, run a pay period, and Argo Books calculates CPP, EI and income tax withholdings, then posts the net pay straight into your books as an expense.

Note: Payroll is a Premium feature. See the version comparison for what each plan includes.

Canada only: Payroll follows CRA and Revenu Québec rules and produces Canadian forms (T4, RL-1, ROE). It is not designed for employers outside Canada.

Adding Employees

Everything payroll needs about a person lives on the Employees page:

  1. Go to "Employees" in the navigation menu
  2. Click "Add employee"
  3. Enter their name, SIN, and start date
  4. Select their province of employment, which determines the tax tables used
  5. Choose salary or hourly, and set the pay frequency
  6. Enter their TD1 federal and provincial claim amounts from the forms they filled in
  7. Set any CPP or EI exemptions that apply
  8. Select the dental coverage code, which becomes box 45 on their T4

Note: Employees are archived rather than deleted, and the Employees page has separate "Active employees" and "Archived" views. A T4 still has to be produceable for someone who left partway through the year, so their history stays intact.

Running Payroll

Pay runs live on their own page. Go to "Pay Runs" and click "Run payroll" to start one. It is three steps:

  1. Period: Set the period dates and pay date, and choose who is being paid
  2. Amounts: Enter hours or pay, plus vacation pay and any other earnings
  3. Review: Check the calculated deductions and net pay, then approve

The review step also shows your total cost, meaning gross pay plus your employer share of CPP and EI, and the total to remit.

Approving the run writes one expense per employee at their net pay. The withheld amounts are not written as separate expenses, because the money has not left your business yet. It leaves when you make your remittance, which keeps the expense from being counted twice.

Warnings and Blocks

Argo Books checks a pay run before it is approved. Some problems stop the run, others just flag it:

  • Blocked: A pay period that runs backwards, where the end date is before the start date
  • Warning: A period that overlaps one an employee has already been paid for
  • Warning: A pay date more than 90 days after the period ends
  • Warning: An employee reaching a CPP, CPP2, EI or QPIP annual maximum partway through the period
  • Warning: A missing TD1 claim amount

Warnings appear on the review step and can be accepted. They are usually mistakes, but each one is occasionally exactly right, so the decision stays with you.

Voiding a Pay Run

An approved run is not deleted. Voiding it writes a reversing run and removes the associated wage expenses, so the correction is visible in your history rather than the original run simply disappearing.

Deduction Tables

No tax rates are built into Argo Books. Every rate, bracket and annual ceiling lives in a dated edition file. CRA and Revenu Québec reissue their figures twice a year, in January and July, and Argo Books downloads the matching edition when a pay run needs one it does not already have.

Downloaded editions are checked before they are trusted. An edition is only kept if it parses, its identifier matches the one requested, and every derived maximum reproduces from its own rate with brackets meeting cleanly at each boundary. Anything that fails those checks is discarded and changes nothing.

Note: If no edition covers your pay date, Argo Books will not calculate the run. It does not fall back to the previous period's rates. A deduction calculated from stale tables looks correct and lands on a real person's pay, so refusing is the safer behaviour.

Quebec

Quebec is calculated separately, because none of its figures appear in CRA's tables. Argo Books implements Revenu Québec's own method, including QPP, QPIP and the federal abatement. Quebec employers also get RL-1 slips at year end alongside their T4s.

What Payroll Does Not Cover

Argo Books handles the common case for small employers. It does not currently support:

  • Registered pension plan contributions or union dues
  • The Quebec health services fund or labour standards contributions
  • Direct deposit or paying employees from within the app
  • Filing directly with CRA or Revenu Québec

Year-end forms are generated for you to file yourself. See Payroll Year-End.

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