The person on the other end
Who is actually going to read your file?
One person reads it and the same person is on the call. So it is worth knowing what he is, what he is not, and exactly where the line sits between his work and your accountant's.
I have been reading corporate returns since 1990. I came to Canada in 1994 and worked as an accountant here for the next fourteen years. Corporate returns, personal returns, year ends, the CRA correspondence nobody enjoys. That is where all of this starts, and it is still what I do.
In 2008 I took my life licence and started my own practice. The reason was narrow and it has not changed. I kept watching clients pay tax they did not need to pay, and then leave their families holding a bill nobody had warned them about, and there was nothing I could do about the second half of that from inside a tax return. The insurance practice grew out of the accounting one rather than replacing it. The strategies start on the tax side. The coverage is how they get funded on the day.
That is the only claim being made here. Not that the accounting makes me a better salesperson, but that I can read your accountant's file and follow your lawyer's drafting without either of them having to stop and translate for me. We work out of Surrey, mostly with physicians, dentists and incorporated owners across the Lower Mainland, and where a client moves the file goes with them.
The name came from a client. We had put everything he owned on one page, and when he looked at it he said: what you did was priceless. I have sat with a lot of advisors and nobody ever showed me this. It stuck, and we named the firm after it. It is a description of the page, not a description of us.
On the record
Four rows, one claim each. They are set out separately on purpose, because the licence and the accounting years are different kinds of thing and running them together would say something neither of them says.
What is he, and what is he not?
- Licence
- Life licensed in British Columbia, Alberta and Ontario. Quebec pending. It covers life insurance and nothing beyond it.
- Tax work
- Since 1990. Thirty-six years, fourteen of them as an accountant in Canada before the licence.
- Coverage
- Since 2008. Eighteen years, alongside the accounting rather than instead of it.
- Not a CPA
- Prabhjit Virk is not a Canadian CPA and does not file your return. Your accountant keeps that work.
The disclosure, said outright
Prabhjit Virk is not a Canadian CPA.
Life insurance licences are held in British Columbia, Alberta and Ontario. Quebec is pending.
The licence is a Canadian authorisation to place life insurance and it does not extend to anything else. The accounting years sitting behind it are experience, not a second licence, and nothing here is a substitute for the accountant who signs your return.
Five major Canadian carriers. We place with whichever one fits the file.
Who owns which part of your file?
Most professionals have three people working on the same corporation and no agreement anywhere about where one stops. That is not usually anybody's fault. It is just that nobody wrote it down. So here it is written down, and the middle column is the one that costs people money when it is left vague.
Your accountant
- The corporate and personal returns
- The elections, the year end, the CRA correspondence
- The capital dividend account balance and the adjusted cost basis
- Whether a structure is right for this file at all
Your lawyer
- The shareholders agreement and the buy-sell clause inside it
- The will, the trust deed, the freeze
- Independent advice for every party to anything
- Anything that has to hold up if it is ever argued about
This practice
- What the policy actually says, and whether it still fits the file
- Sizing, ownership, and which pocket writes the cheque
- The liquidity that funds the plan on the day it is needed
- Reading the whole picture and saying out loud what is missing from it
Where the line sits
Thirty-six years of tax work means we can read your accountant's file and follow your lawyer's drafting without either of them having to translate. That is the whole benefit. It is not a licence to do their job, and we don't.
Second audience
If you are the accountant or the lawyer reading this
You have probably had the experience of sending a client to somebody who came back having quietly reorganised the whole relationship. That is not how this works, and we would rather say so upfront than ask you to find out. We take the insurance piece, we report back to you in writing so you can check the analysis against your own file, and the client stays yours. If something on the file is properly your work it goes to you, including work we could technically have kept. Referrals go both ways, or they stop coming.
Accountant
Book around your year
Nothing between February and the end of April unless you want it. Early mornings, after close, or we come to your office. Fifteen minutes if that is all you have got. You are the one with the filing deadline, so the meeting moves to you rather than the other way round.
Estate planning lawyer
Book around your calendar
Your constraint is not seasonal, it is that your time is billed in six-minute units. So usually the useful version of this is us joining a client meeting you have already scheduled, rather than asking you to sit through a separate one. Say when, and we will work to it.
Or neither of those
No meeting at all
Or skip the calendar entirely. Send us a file with the client's name taken off and we will come back in writing. Plenty of these start that way and never need a meeting at all.
[email protected] Take the name off it first. We do not need to know whose file it is to tell you whether there is anything on it.
Fifteen minutes
Worth a quarter of an hour to find out?
Nothing to send in advance and nothing to prepare. If there is nothing on your file worth changing we will say so on the call rather than booking a second one to get there. The calendar link is still being set up, so until it lands the phone and the email below are the fastest routes in.