Payroll Prep Copilot
A payroll month that runs on a checklist instead of memory, with the CRA remittance date, the T4 deadline and the change-of-status paperwork all in one place
The problem
Payroll in a small business is a dozen small deadlines that live in one person's head. The CRA remittance that's due on the 15th. The new hire who needs a TD1 before the first cheque. The employee who left on the 3rd and needs a Record of Employment. The T4s that are due at the end of February and get done on the 27th, every year, at night. Nothing about the math is hard, since the payroll software does the math. What goes wrong is the sequence: a remittance a day late, a form that never got signed, a vacation balance nobody tracked. This skill keeps the sequence.
The tool
Once installed, this skill is the payroll coordinator who doesn't do the calculations and doesn't need to. Your payroll software or your bookkeeper handles deductions. The skill handles everything around them: the calendar, the checklists, the paperwork that has to exist, and the questions to ask your accountant before you guess.
Seed it with your province, your pay frequency, your remitter type (it will explain how the CRA assigns one if you don't know yours), and your headcount. From then on it runs the month: a pre-payroll checklist before each run (hours approved, new hires set up, changes recorded), a remittance reminder matched to your remitter type, and a year-end plan that starts in January rather than the last week of February. When someone joins, leaves, or changes status, it produces the paperwork list for that event. It pairs with the Bookkeeping Copilot, which handles the ledger side of the same month.
What's inside
- A payroll calendar built from your pay frequency and your CRA remitter type, with the due dates written out
- A pre-run checklist for every pay period, so the same five mistakes stop happening
- Event checklists: new hire, departure (including the Record of Employment), leave, raise, change of address or banking
- A year-end plan for T4s and the summary, with the February deadline worked backward into January tasks
- A vacation pay and statutory holiday reminder keyed to your province's rules, with a "confirm with your accountant" line on every rate
- A question list for your accountant, so the conversation takes ten minutes instead of a month of emails
How to use it
- 1Click "Install skill" on this page and copy the install prompt.
- 2Paste it into your AI assistant (ChatGPT, Claude, anything that accepts pasted text).
- 3Answer the setup questions once: province, pay frequency, remitter type, headcount, and which software runs the math.
- 4Before each payroll, ask for the pre-run checklist and work through it.
- 5When someone joins or leaves, tell the skill and follow the event checklist it gives you.
Example
An eight-person landscaping company in Barrie pays biweekly and remits monthly as a regular remitter. In setup the skill lays out the year: remittances due on the 15th of the month after the deductions were made, T4s to the CRA and to each employee by the last day of February, and the seasonal layoff in November, which means eight Records of Employment inside the deadline. In October the owner says a crew lead is leaving on the 20th. The checklist that comes back covers the final pay including vacation owed, the ROE, the benefits end date, the truck keys and the gate code. The owner's accountant gets one email with four questions instead of twelve.
Pro tip
Ask the skill for the year-end plan in the first week of January, when there's nothing else on. T4 season is calm for the businesses that spend an hour in January confirming every employee's address and SIN, and frantic for everyone else. And treat every rate the skill mentions as a prompt to check the CRA page or your accountant, since contribution rates and thresholds change every January.
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