I’m sure several users have clients that have a legal name as well as a business name or style. For instance;
Mickey M. Mouse o/a
Mickey’s Amusements
or
123456 Canada Inc o/a
Worlds Finest Snowplows
Profile had room for both names on the T4 slip (but did not include the employer’s address), whereas Taxcycle allocates 1 line for the employer’s name but also includes the employer’s address on the actual T4 slip. Sometimes I can get both names on the 1 line and other times the name would be too long to fit on the T4.
I have netfiled some T4 slips using Taxcycle over the last few days with only the Legal Name (ie 123456 Canada Inc) as the employer and also netfiled them with only the trade name (World’s Finest Snowplows) and no legal name. I do prefer using the trade name as this is the name most of the employee’s identify with.
Just wondering what others are doing. Using the legal name or the trade name of the business in cases where an employer has both.
Remember that the CRA will post the slip with only the legal name. This surprises some people to find out that, when they are thinking that they are working for a corporation, they are actually working for an individual or a numbered company. So, why worry overly much over what the name is. Put in the same info as the CRA has online.
I ended up settling for a bit of a compromise. I have changed my policy such that I enter the legal name of the employer in the name field and use the first line of the address field for the Business name if it differs from the legal name of the business. The T4 slips look pretty decent using this approach. They netfile fine… and the submission shows up in the employer’s online CRA file (T4 group return status information) within about 30 minutes as being filed, lists the Taxcycle submission number, and a status of “processing in progress”. It seems to take about 2 days for the status to turn from “processing in progress” to “processed”.