Two provinces, two languages, one set of numbers you actually control.

No. And in Canada that means three separate things we do not do: the HST return the CRA collects in Ontario, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Newfoundland and PEI; the QST return Revenu Québec administers separately; and the PST filings British Columbia, Saskatchewan and Manitoba run themselves. i-shim gives you one tax-rate field per line, which you set. Your accountant or your accounting software still owns the filing.

Yes, and we would rather say so than exaggerate our gap. In the US there are thousands of local jurisdictions and economic nexus thresholds per state. In Canada it is one rate per province and a single federal registration threshold of $30,000 over four consecutive quarters — with Québec as the notable exception, since QST is registered and filed separately even though the threshold mirrors the federal one. Simpler, but still not something we calculate.

No, and this is the one place Canada is easier than most countries we have written up. There is no mandatory B2B e-invoicing law; the CRA accepts paper, PDF or EDI as long as the invoice carries the required tax information. Peppol-style exchange exists for federal procurement but is voluntary. So unlike Italy, Spain, Mexico or Japan, nothing blocks us at the door here.

Six years from the end of the tax year. Electronic records have to stay readable and retrievable for that whole period. The approval chain does record who entered a transaction and when, who approved it and when, and the period lock stops a closed month from moving — genuinely useful in an audit. But we are not a certified archiving product and we do not claim to be.

No. No T4 or T4A, no CPP, EI or CPP2, no source deductions, no ROE, no WCB or WSIB. The payroll engine inside the app is configured for Türkiye and Azerbaijan and is not usable here. Keep Wagepoint, Payworks, QuickBooks Payroll or your bookkeeper, and record the payment in i-shim.

Yes, properly. French sits at 12,111 strings and 99.9% coverage — it is not a partial translation. More usefully, language is a per-user setting rather than a company setting, so an anglophone owner and a francophone crew work on the same job in the same data. One caveat: the French is written for France, not Québec, so the register will occasionally feel European.

Because it would be a worse page, not a better one. We already publish a French page for France, and a second French page describing the same product would be close enough to it that search engines treat both as low-value duplicates — the exact pattern our own publishing rules forbid. The real Canadian difference is not the language, it is having three tax administrations. That belongs on one page, written properly, which is this one.

A crew member records an expense, a purchase or an inventory movement from their phone. It stays pending — invisible in the lists, no effect on balances — until you approve it. You can reject, ask for an explanation, or hand approval to a site lead once being the bottleneck stops working.

No. No feeds to Canadian institutions, no automatic categorisation. You import a statement or enter movements by hand. Every established Canadian accounting product does this and we do not.

Often you shouldn't. Wave and FreshBooks are both Toronto companies and Wave's accounting is free, so the permanently-free tier we lean on in other markets buys us nothing here. The reason to add i-shim is narrower: you have people spending your money away from the office and you want an approval step before it becomes a number, across more than one site. If that is not your problem, Wave is a fine answer.

Not in the app — each company and location is set up separately with its own inventory, float and people, all 13 provinces and territories are there, and the crew can be in either language. It causes problems in your filing, which is exactly the part we do not touch.

Yes — one XLSX or CSV export with a period lock so a closed month cannot shift. There is no QuickBooks, Sage or Xero import format, no .IIF, and we file nothing.

Jobs and cost centres, yes — tag expenses, inventory and equipment hours to a job and see what it actually cost. Customer-facing quotes with e-signature, no.

There is a permanently free tier. Deeper features are a subscription, priced per storefront by Apple and Google, which is why we do not print a number here.

On Google Firebase, with access enforced server-side: someone outside your company cannot read its data. Servers are in western Europe, not Canada. If a contract or a provincial public-sector rule requires Canadian residency, this is not for you today.

No. Financial records write straight to the server because the approval chain needs one source of truth. Only chat keeps a local cache.

If you are a sole proprietor with no crew, no: there is nothing to approve, and Wave already does your books for free. If your pain is the GST/HST return, no — QuickBooks and Sage were built for that. Add i-shim if people spend your money on sites you are not standing on, and you want that approved before it lands.

No. Sign up, create a company, use it. The subscription is monthly and you cancel it in the store.

There is a helper bee inside the app: type “feedback” to it and your message goes to the team with a screenshot attached. Or email [email protected].