Bookkeeping · Accounting · Tax
Cents and Pennies Services is a small bookkeeping, accounting, and tax practice in Calgary, Alberta. Leonora Balongaya has kept books for more than 45 years, in six countries. She works with owners who want their records in order, their filings sent on time, and their questions answered by the person who actually knows their file.
Calgary and area in person. The rest of Alberta online.
Who this practice is for
Most people who call are not looking for a large firm. They want someone who will pick up the phone, explain what the CRA is asking for, and fix what is behind without making them feel foolish about it.
Restaurants, cleaning companies, trades, care services, and shops with 2 to 20 employees, usually one to five years old. The rules in Canada are not the rules you grew up with, and nobody hands you a manual. That gap is where penalties begin. It can be closed.
Trades, health, and care businesses that are tired of shoeboxes and spreadsheets. Your books move to QuickBooks Online or Xero. Receipts stop getting lost, and you can check your numbers on any day of the month instead of waiting until year end.
If you are registering a business this year, a few early decisions will follow you for a long time: how the business is structured, whether to register for GST/HST, and how you pay yourself and your staff. Setting it up properly costs far less than fixing it later.
Services
You can hand over everything, or only the parts you would rather not do. Some clients pass on the whole file, from supplier invoices through to the corporate tax return. Others enter their own daily transactions and bring in help for reconciliation, GST/HST, and year end.
Fees
No two businesses cost the same to look after, so a price quoted before seeing your records would not be an honest one. Your fee is set after a short look at four things.
A restaurant with daily cash and tips, a trades business with jobs and holdbacks, and a cleaning company with subcontractors each require different work. The industry sets the shape of the job.
How many transactions run through the business each month, how many bank and credit card accounts there are, how many invoices go out, and how many people are on payroll.
Inventory, more than one location, foreign currency, sales in more than one province, or a payroll with several pay types all add time. A simple operation costs less to maintain.
Books that are already current cost less than books that must be rebuilt from two or three years of receipts. Cleanup work is quoted separately from the ongoing monthly work.
Tax filing is priced at current market rates for the type of return being prepared. After the free consultation you receive a written proposal setting out the scope of work and the fee, either hourly or a fixed monthly amount. Monthly retainers are available if you would rather have one predictable figure than a variable invoice. Nothing is charged until you have accepted that proposal.
How it works
Nothing is billed until the work and the fee are agreed in writing.
Thirty minutes by phone, video, or at your place of business. Bring whatever you have, including the envelope of receipts you have been avoiding.
What has been filed, what is outstanding, and what the CRA is expecting from you. You get a plain answer, whether or not you hire anyone.
The work to be done, the timeline, and the fee. You know the cost before the first entry is made.
Your books move to QuickBooks Online or Xero, deadlines go on a calendar, and your statements arrive on schedule rather than in a panic.
About
Leonora Balongaya began her career as a student assistant in a university treasurer's office in the Philippines, and she has worked with ledgers ever since. She spent seven years in Kuwait, first in hospitality with the Hyatt hotels and then with a United States oil and gas corporation. She served four and a half years as an auditor and consultant to a not for profit organization, and three years in Indonesia as Financial Controller of a Singaporean chip manufacturing company with 2,500 employees. She also built the accounting system for a Procter and Gamble distributor, to P&G International standards.
She arrived in Canada in 2002 and started again from the beginning, working in retail and on accounting contracts while she rebuilt her credentials here. Since then she has worked in manufacturing, distribution and logistics, education, and oil and gas. Cents and Pennies Services was founded in Calgary in 2020.
It is a one person practice. The person who reviews your file is the person who answers the phone and the person who signs the return. Nothing is handed to a junior you will never meet.
Leonora is an immigrant herself. She knows what it is to arrive in a new country and be handed a set of rules that nobody explains to you. Many of her clients are owners from the Filipino, Chinese, South Asian, Vietnamese, African, and Middle Eastern communities in Calgary who are running good businesses and are quietly worried they have missed something. Usually they have missed something. Usually it can be fixed.
The work is not only to file the return. It is to hand back numbers a business owner can actually read, so the next decision is made with the facts in front of them.
Common questions
Get in touch
Call, or send a short message describing your business and what you need help with. You will have a reply within one business day. The first conversation costs nothing and there is no obligation afterwards.