Bookkeeping services in Toronto.
Remote bookkeeping and accounting for Toronto businesses: law firms, agencies, consultancies, and startups across the GTA. A real team, a CPA founder who answers, and flat monthly pricing, without the downtown firm's rates or its turnaround.
Bookkeeping for the way Toronto businesses actually run.
Numinor keeps the books for Toronto businesses that have outgrown doing it themselves but don't want a slow, expensive downtown firm. We work remotely with clients across the GTA, which means you get a responsive team and clean monthly numbers without paying for someone's office tower.
Toronto runs on professional services: law firms, agencies, consultancies, and a deep startup bench. Those businesses share a problem. The work is billable, the margins live in the details, and the books fall behind the moment the founder gets busy. That is the gap we fill.
To be clear about what we are: our office is in Waterloo, and we serve Toronto clients remotely. For most Toronto businesses that is the point. Your books are in the cloud, your team is reachable, and nobody is driving across the city for a meeting that could be a call.
- What bookkeeping costs in Toronto
- How remote bookkeeping actually works
- Bookkeeping for Toronto's main industries
- Where we work across the GTA
- QuickBooks cleanup and ProAdvisor support
- Freelance bookkeeper, in-house hire, or a firm?
- Ontario and Toronto tax notes
- What we do for Toronto businesses
- Frequently asked questions
Responsive, not bureaucratic. Built for billable work.
Responsive, not bureaucratic
Single-threaded firms hate waiting on a partner to call back. You get a real team and a CPA founder who answers.
Built for billable businesses
Books set up so you see margin by client and by project, which is where professional services and agencies actually make or lose money.
Half people, half software
An experienced bookkeeping team plus modern tools (QuickBooks Online, where we are a Platinum ProAdvisor). Judgment and speed, together.
Flat pricing
Starter is CAD 299 a month, Growth is CAD 499 a month. Base pricing, scoped to your volume and complexity on the discovery call. No hourly meter, no surprise March invoice.
What bookkeeping costs in Toronto
Toronto rates sit at the top of the Canadian range, which is the first thing worth being direct about.
| What you are buying | Typical Toronto monthly range |
|---|---|
| Freelance or part-time bookkeeper | $300 to $900 |
| Downtown accounting firm, bookkeeping engagement | $800 to $2,500 |
| Full-time in-house bookkeeper, all-in | About $5,000 to $5,700 |
| Numinor Starter | $299 |
| Numinor Growth | $499 |
Our plans are flat and scoped on the discovery call, so the number you are quoted is the number you pay. Base pricing varies with transaction volume, payroll, sales tax filings, and how many entities you run. No hourly meter, and no surprise invoice in March because year-end got complicated.
The reason a Waterloo-based firm can serve Toronto below Toronto rates is not a trick, and it is worth saying plainly: we are not paying for a Bay Street floor, and we are not passing that cost to you. The work, the credential, and the review layer are the same.
For the full breakdown of what moves the price of an engagement, see what bookkeeping costs in Canada.
How remote bookkeeping actually works
A lot of Toronto businesses search specifically for remote or virtual bookkeeping, so here is the honest mechanics of it.
Your accounts connect once. We set up secure, read-only bank and credit card feeds into QuickBooks Online. You are not couriering statements, and you are not emailing anyone a password.
Receipts arrive however you like. Photograph them, forward the emails, or drop them in a shared folder. Tools like Dext and Hubdoc pull the data off them so nobody is typing line items.
We close every month on a schedule. Reconciliations, categorization, sales tax, and a set of financial statements you can actually read, delivered on a fixed date rather than whenever it gets done.
You get a person, not a portal. A named contact who knows your file, plus a CPA founder above them. Questions get answered the same or next business day.
Nobody has to drive anywhere. If you want a face, it is a video call. If you want to meet in person, our Waterloo office is about an hour and a half out, and clients do occasionally make the trip.
What you give up honestly: you cannot walk to someone's desk at 3pm and get an answer at 3:01. If your operation truly needs a person physically present, an in-house hire is the better answer and we will tell you so on the call.
Bookkeeping for Toronto's main industries
Law firms
Toronto has the densest concentration of law firms in the country, and legal bookkeeping is its own discipline. Trust accounting is the reason. The Law Society of Ontario's By-Law 9 sets out the records a firm has to keep and requires trust accounts to be reconciled on a regular cycle, and a trust shortfall is a regulatory problem, not just an accounting one.
We keep general and trust books separately and correctly, reconcile trust on schedule, and produce the records a spot audit asks for. If you are on PCLaw, Clio, or Cosmolex, we work in it rather than asking you to move. More on this on our law firm bookkeeping page.
Agencies and creative studios
Retainers, project work, pass-through media spend, and contractor payments. Agencies routinely look profitable on paper while cash is tight, because deposits and unbilled work in progress are sitting in the wrong place.
We set the books up so you can see margin by client and by project, split retainer revenue from project revenue, and handle contractor payments and the slips that follow.
Consultancies and professional services
Billable-hour businesses live and die on realization and utilization, and neither shows up in a standard profit and loss statement. We structure the chart of accounts so the numbers you actually manage against are visible without a spreadsheet rebuild every quarter.
Startups and tech
Toronto's startup bench needs two things from bookkeeping: monthly financials an investor will trust, and books organized so a Scientific Research and Experimental Development (SR&ED) claim holds up when the CRA reviews it. We do both, and our CFO bench can step in for a model, a board pack, or a raise. See SR&ED tax credits and CFO services.
Real estate and property
Multiple entities, intercompany transactions, and HST treatment that varies with the type of property and transaction. This is the category where do-it-yourself bookkeeping goes wrong most expensively, usually on sales tax.
Where we work across the GTA
Because we work remotely, geography inside the GTA does not change the service or the price. It does change who your neighbors are, so here is where our Toronto-area clients actually sit.
- Downtown and the financial district. Law firms, consultancies, and finance-adjacent professional services.
- King West, Liberty Village, and the Distillery District. Agencies, studios, and startups.
- North York. Professional services, medical and dental practices, and family-run businesses along the Yonge corridor.
- Scarborough. Trades, logistics, manufacturing, and a growing set of tech and service businesses.
- Etobicoke. Trades, distribution, and owner-operated businesses near the airport corridor.
- Mississauga, Vaughan, Markham, and Brampton. The rest of the GTA, same service.
If you are outside the city proper, our areas we serve index has the full list.
QuickBooks cleanup and ProAdvisor support
Numinor is a QuickBooks Online Platinum ProAdvisor, which is Intuit's top certification tier, and QuickBooks is the platform most of our client books run on. We are also Xero Certified, and we will tell you to stay on Xero if that is the better fit for your business.
Two things Toronto businesses ask us for most often:
Cleanup. A file that has been running for a year or three with duplicated transactions, an invented chart of accounts, unreconciled bank feeds, and sales tax coded inconsistently. We rebuild it, reconcile it back to the statements, and hand you a file your accountant can close from. This is usually a fixed-scope project rather than a monthly plan, and we quote it after looking at the file.
Setup and migration. Moving from spreadsheets, from Wave, or from a desktop version, with a chart of accounts built for how your business actually earns money rather than the default template.
If you are choosing a platform rather than fixing one, our comparison of QuickBooks, Xero, and Wave in Canada walks through it.
Freelance bookkeeper, in-house hire, or a firm?
A fair question, and the answer is not always us.
A freelance bookkeeper is often the cheapest monthly number in Toronto, and for a simple set of books it can work well. The risks are continuity and review. One person holds your file, nobody checks their work, and when they take a contract elsewhere the knowledge goes with them.
An in-house hire makes sense once the finance work is genuinely full-time, which usually means high daily transaction volume or somewhere north of about $2 million in revenue. Below that you are buying more seat than the work needs, and you are paying roughly $5,000 to $5,700 a month all-in once employer contributions, vacation, benefits, and software are counted.
A firm gives you a team, a review layer above the person doing the work, and coverage when someone is away. That combination is why most Toronto businesses between their first employee and their first finance hire end up here.
We wrote the full comparison, including the numbers behind each option: hiring a bookkeeper vs outsourcing vs doing it yourself.
Ontario and Toronto tax notes.
HST, not GST plus PST. Ontario is harmonized, so Toronto businesses charge and file a single 13% HST rather than two taxes. That simplifies the return, not the bookkeeping. Input tax credits still depend on the tax being captured correctly on every receipt, and categories with restricted recovery, meals and entertainment being the one everyone meets first, still have to be split rather than claimed whole.
Employer Health Tax. Ontario levies a payroll tax on employers. Eligible private-sector employers get an exemption on the first slice of Ontario payroll, and that exemption phases out as payroll grows. The trap for our clients is the association rule: corporations that are associated share one exemption between them, so a founder running two companies does not get to claim it twice. The exemption amount, the phase-out threshold, and the rate scale all change, so we check them against ontario.ca at filing rather than carrying a number in our heads.
WSIB. Most Ontario employers need coverage, and premium rates depend on how the business is classified. Misclassification is the common error, and it is usually discovered years later when the adjustment is large.
Two land transfer taxes inside the city. Toronto levies its own Municipal Land Transfer Tax on top of the provincial one, so a property purchase inside the old city limits carries both. If your business buys or holds property in Toronto, that is a real cost line to budget for, and it is one that surprises buyers coming from elsewhere in the GTA. Toronto also runs a Vacant Home Tax that requires an annual occupancy declaration from residential property owners whether the property is occupied or not. The deadlines and the rules have shifted year to year, so check the City's current requirement rather than last year's.
The agency and professional-services math. Retainers, deposits, and work in progress are the reason a Toronto agency can look profitable on paper while cash is tight. Revenue booked when the money arrives rather than when the work is done flatters one month and starves the next. We set the books up to show the real picture.
Five services, one team, one number.
Monthly close, reconciliations, and financials you can read.
Behind on your books? We get you current with the CRA in about 30 days.
Personal and corporate filing, HST, and planning, handled alongside the books.
Fractional finance for firms that need a model, a board pack, or fundraising support.
For Toronto's startups, books organized so the R&D claim holds up.
What Toronto owners ask before they sign on.
Toronto, the GTA, and across Ontario from our base in Waterloo.
Tell us where your books stand.
We'll give you a straight read on what they need and what it costs, whether you sign on or not. Numinor plans start at CAD 299 a month.