Learn the money part

When you work for yourself, no one withholds tax from your pay. The whole payment lands in your account — which feels great in June and rough next spring if you've spent all of it.

The fix is boring and it works: every time you get paid, move a slice into a separate "tax" account and forget it's there. A lot of creatives land somewhere around a quarter to a third of profit, but the right number depends on your income, your province or state, and your deductions — that part is between you and your accountant.

In the Ledger you can set a percentage on each payment, and we'll keep a running total of what you've earmarked. We only ever show you that total. We don't calculate what you owe CRA, and we never will — that's not our job, and getting it wrong would cost you more than it's worth.

GST/HST is separate from your income tax. It's tax you collect from clients on the CRA's behalf and pass along — it was never your money.

There's a small-supplier threshold — commonly around $30,000 of revenue over four calendar quarters — below which many self-employed people aren't required to register or charge it. Cross it and the rules change. The exact figure and how the rolling period is counted are worth confirming, because once you should be registered, you want to be.

We help you keep your GST/HST legible — what you charged, what you paid — so registering or filing isn't a shoebox exercise. Whether and when you need to register is a question for your accountant.

The plain-language test most self-employed people use: was this an ordinary and necessary cost of earning your income? Camera gear, the software you edit in, mileage to a shoot, the booth at a wedding show, your liability insurance — these are the everyday costs of the work.

We sort your receipts into the buckets your accountant expects to see — for you, that's CRA business expenses. You don't have to memorize the categories; you photograph the receipt, we read it, and you confirm where it goes.

Two things save everyone grief: keep the receipt (a photo is fine), and keep business and personal apart so a meal with a client doesn't get tangled with groceries. The mixed ones — a phone you also use personally, a car that's both — get split by the share you actually use for work, and that's a conversation to have with your accountant.

Every scout, every shoot, every supply run — the driving you do for work is deductible, but not the way a lot of people assume.

For the self-employed, the CRA doesn't give you a flat per-kilometre write-off. (Those cents-per-kilometre figures you've seen are an employee reimbursement rate — a different thing.) Instead you deduct your business-use percentage of your real vehicle costs: gas, insurance, repairs, the lot.

So the two numbers that matter are how far you drove for work and what share of your total driving that was. We track both. The dollar figure comes later, from your actual costs, with your accountant — which is why we don't show a per-kilometre dollar here. It would be the wrong number.

When you send an invoice through the Ledger, the money moves through your own Square or Stripe account — the one in your name, that you already control. It lands with you, not with us. We're the paperwork around the payment, never the place the payment sits.

That's also why an invoice flips to “paid” on its own. Your processor tells us the money actually arrived, and only then does the status change. We don't let anyone — including you — mark an invoice paid by hand, because the one time it's wrong is the time it matters.

Practically, that means the “outstanding” number on your overview is real: it's what's genuinely still owed to you, not what someone remembered to update.

You don't need a company or a fancy setup. You need one bank account and ideally one card that you only use for the business. That's it. That one boundary does more for your sanity at tax time than any app, including this one.

When business money has its own lane, your income is just “everything that came into this account” and your expenses are “everything that went out.” No archaeology, no guessing whether that March charge was lenses or a vacation.

Pay yourself by moving money from the business account to your personal one when you want it. That transfer is just you taking your pay — it isn't a business expense, and keeping it visible as its own thing keeps the picture honest.