T5018: the slip every GC forgets until June

If construction is more than half of your business income and you pay subcontractors for construction services, you file a T5018 slip for each sub and a summary for the CRA. That covers most GCs, and plenty of trades who sub out overflow work without thinking of themselves as 'a GC'.

It applies whether you're incorporated or not, and whether the sub is a corporation, a sole proprietor, or a partnership.

Report the total you paid each subcontractor for construction services in your reporting period — labour, or mixed labour-and-materials contracts. Goods-only purchases (a lumber yard invoice) don't belong on a T5018.

Report the amount including HST, but test the $500 threshold on the payment before tax — under $500 before tax for a sub in the period, no slip needed.

You choose to report on a calendar-year or fiscal-year basis; either way, slips and summary are due six months after the end of the period you picked. Fiscal-year filers: that's the same deadline as your T2 — one paperwork season, not two.

T5018s exist to surface underground-economy income: your slip tells the CRA what your subs earned, and their returns had better agree. Late or missing slips carry per-slip penalties that scale with how late you are — small individually, ugly multiplied across a sub roster.

The fix is boring: track subcontractor payments as their own expense category all year. If your books do that from January, the June filing is an export, not an archaeology dig. That categorization is part of monthly bookkeeping when we keep your books.