How to keep your books in LedgerLodge

Setting up

Create an account with your email and a password. On your first visit you are asked a few facts about the corporation. They are not cosmetic: they choose reporting periods, filing eligibility, and the defaults shown on new records.

• Province. Identifies the corporation’s home jurisdiction and prefills guided choices. Each trip still records where the driving actually occurred.
• Fiscal year end. Statements and exports are cut on this boundary.
• GST/HST registration. If the corporation is not registered, no input tax credits are claimed anywhere in the app.

These facts live under More → Settings afterwards. Changing them affects new records; existing ones keep the numbers they were saved with.

Recording an expense

There are three ways in, and they end at the same place — a draft you check before it is saved.

Categories and their rules

Choosing the category is the one judgement the app cannot make for you, because it decides which rule applies.

The two that catch people out

• A gift card to a restaurant is not a gift. Food, drink and entertainment are limited to 50% however they are given, so a restaurant card or event tickets fall to 50% while a branded hamper stays at 100%. The app asks you which it was.
• The seventh staff event drops to 50%. Events are numbered by date across the calendar year, so backdating one renumbers the rest. The rule also expects the event to have been open to all employees at that location — the app cannot verify that, so the record should reflect it honestly.

PST is never claimable as an input tax credit, so it is excluded from the credit base everywhere in the app while still counting toward what you actually paid.

Splitting a bill

When only part of a bill is the corporation’s — a dinner split with another company, or a table where half the covers were personal — record the receipt as it is printed and set the company’s share.

The subtotal, the GST/HST and the tip are each divided by that share before any rule is applied, so the deduction and the credit are both taken on what the company actually bore. A $176.40 dinner split in half claims $88.20, credits $1.88 of GST, and deducts $43.16 after applying the meal rate to the net expense.

Who paid

Every expense records whether it went on the business card or a personal one, and whose. People you add are a list you keep — a colleague who fronted a taxi fare is a name here, not an account. Nobody else signs in.

Anything on a personal card, plus all mileage, becomes money the company owes that person. It shows up under Reimburse, grouped by who is owed.

Settling up

Select what you are paying and record the transfer. One transfer settles one person — the app will not let a single batch span two payers, because the bank transfer behind it did not. Attaching the e-transfer confirmation keeps the trail complete.

Mileage

Business kilometres are reimbursed at the prescribed rate, which steps down after the first 5,000 km in a calendar year. For 2026 that is 73¢ then 67¢. A trip that straddles the boundary is split across both rates.

Because the rate depends on how far you have already driven that year, adding a trip with an earlier date changes every trip after it. The app recalculates the whole year in date order whenever a trip is added, edited or deleted, and keeps a record of what it changed.

Record the route and the purpose on every trip. CRA’s expectation for a mileage log is the date, the destination, the reason and the distance — the app asks for all four. A per-kilometre allowance does not need a fuel receipt; the completed trip log is the supporting record.

A company-owned or company-leased vehicle uses a different workflow: record fuel, insurance, repairs, parking, lease charges, and loan interest as vehicle running costs. The app applies that vehicle’s business-use percentage and the applicable lease or interest ceiling. The vehicle purchase itself belongs in the asset register for CCA.

Foreign currency

Enter what you were charged, in the currency you were charged. The Bank of Canada rate for the transaction date converts it, and both the original amount and the rate are stored so the conversion can be re-checked later. You can override the rate when your statement used a different one.

A US software subscription usually carries no GST/HST, so there is nothing to claim as a credit — the deduction still applies in full.

Receipts and evidence

Attach the receipt to the expense. Images and PDFs up to 12 MB are accepted, stored privately, and only ever served through short-lived links.

To claim the GST/HST back, the paperwork has to carry certain things:

• Under $100 — the supplier’s name, the date, and the total.
• $100 and over — also the supplier’s GST/HST registration number.
• $500 and over — also your corporation’s name, a description of what was bought, and the payment terms.

Missing registration numbers are the most common reason a credit is denied on review, so record it while the receipt is in your hand.

Statements and exports

A monthly statement summarises the period by category with the deductible and credit totals, and prints cleanly. At year end, the XLSX and CSV exports carry every field an accountant asks for: the components, the rate applied, the deductible amount, the claimable credit, and a count of the receipts — the receipt files themselves travel in the evidence and CPA ZIPs, which carry them rather than links that expire.

Hand your CPA the export, not screenshots.

Getting the books out, and keeping them straight:

• Any time, in open formats. Expenses as XLSX and CSV, the vehicle logbook as CSV, monthly statements as PDF, and the audit and CPA packages as ZIPs whose manifest.json lists the SHA-256 of every file inside.
• After the trial, read-only — not locked. Without a plan you can still open every record and run every export except one: finalizing a CPA package is a write, so it needs a plan. A draft CPA package still exports.
• Corrections are reversals. A posted journal entry is never edited or deleted; fixing one posts a reversal and a replacement, so the history stays in the books.
• Self-hostable. The whole stack runs from a docker compose file with billing switched off, no telemetry and no licence check.

What this does not do

This is a record-keeping tool. It organises what you enter and applies configurable defaults — it does not replace advice from a Canadian CPA, and there are things it deliberately leaves alone.

• Capital-asset judgement. The app keeps a CCA schedule once you identify an item as an asset, but your accountant should confirm the class, available-for-use date and final claim.
• Home office and telecom. These are seeded at 100%, which is almost never right for an incorporated owner — only the business-use portion belongs to the corporation, and the rest may be a shareholder benefit. Set the percentage on the subcategory before you use it.
• The Quick Method. Choose it only if CRA accepted the election. Copy the election date and remittance rate from CRA or your accountant; the app will not guess eligibility or a rate.
• Odometer readings. Record the vehicle’s start- and end-of-year readings in the vehicle logbook and keep supporting service records.
• Personal expenses. Nothing here decides whether something was genuinely for the business. That judgement is yours, and it is the one CRA actually tests.

Tax rules change. Review your settings whenever they do, or whenever the corporation’s circumstances do.