Incorporate in Ontario for $400, All Inclusive

What Incorporating in Ontario Actually Involves

Incorporating a business in Ontario means creating a separate legal entity through a formal government filing. In practice that means preparing and submitting Articles of Incorporation, which set out the corporation's name, share structure and registered address. A government filing fee applies to the filing itself.

If you're incorporating under a specific business name rather than as a numbered company, you'll typically also need a name search (a NUANS report is the standard tool for this in Ontario) to confirm the name isn't already in use or too similar to an existing one. A numbered company skips that step, at the cost of a less distinctive public name.

None of this is complicated on its own. It's a document-driven process with a defined set of steps. Where it gets more consequential is in the decisions bundled into it, share structure, number of classes of shares, who the directors are, because those decisions follow the corporation for years.

The Ashbridge Incorporation Service

Ashbridge handles the incorporation filing as part of an online process: you select the service, answer scope questions about the business (name vs. numbered company, number of shareholders, provincial vs. federal), and see a fixed price before you commit to anything. A CPA reviews the setup rather than treating it as a pure form-fill.

The current price, and exactly what's included at that price, is shown in the quote flow, that's the price to work from, not a figure quoted elsewhere. See how incorporation fits alongside Ashbridge's other fixed prices if you're scoping more than one service at once.

The Prepaid Credit Toward Your First Year

Incorporation fees paid to most providers just disappear once the filing is done, money spent on paperwork, with no connection to what comes next. Ashbridge structures it differently: incorporating with Ashbridge includes a prepaid credit that applies toward your first year of accounting work, bookkeeping, HST, payroll or corporate tax, depending on what the business needs.

The logic is straightforward. A new corporation is going to need accounting help within months of filing, whether that's opening-balance bookkeeping, an HST registration decision, or its first T2. The credit means the incorporation fee isn't a sunk cost sitting apart from that work, it's applied against it.

How Incorporation Is Billed and Paid

The fixed incorporation price and exact scope are shown in the online quote before checkout.

What you pay today breaks into three pieces: Ashbridge's service fee for handling the incorporation, the government filing fee (a pass-through cost, not an Ashbridge markup), and the prepaid tax credit described above. The credit is an amount paid now that is applied toward your first year of accounting work with Ashbridge once you need it. See your current price in the quote flow for the exact breakdown for your scope; the amount is paid in full today.

What Happens Right After Incorporating

The corporation existing legally is the start, not the finish. In the weeks after filing, a newly incorporated business typically needs to work through:

• A Business Number. CRA assigns one to the corporation, and it anchors every program account that follows.
• CRA program accounts. An HST/GST account if the business is required to register or chooses to register early, a payroll account if it will have employees, and a corporate income tax account for T2 filings.
• A corporate bank account. Separate from any personal account, opened in the corporation's name.
• A bookkeeping system. Set up before transactions start flowing, not reconstructed after the fact from a shoebox of receipts.

Skipping or delaying any of these doesn't stop the business from operating, but it does mean reconstructing them later, usually at the point where CRA, a bank, or a client is asking for something that doesn't exist yet.

Why First-Year Accounting Setup Matters More Than the Filing

A DIY or bargain incorporation filing can be genuinely fine on its own terms, the Articles get filed, the corporation exists. The expensive failure mode isn't the filing; it's everything left undecided around it. Opening balances that were never properly recorded. Elections that had a deadline and were missed because nobody flagged them. Bookkeeping that starts three months late and has to be rebuilt from bank statements.

Those problems don't show up on day one. They show up at year-end, when a corporate tax accountant has to reconstruct months of activity instead of simply reviewing it, and the bill for cleanup is often larger than the incorporation fee itself would ever have been. Corporate tax work is materially easier, and cheaper, when the books it's built on were set up correctly from month one.

Corporate Records: Minute Book, Share Structure, Directors

An Ontario corporation is expected to keep certain records, commonly organized in a minute book, covering its Articles, share issuances, director and shareholder resolutions, and annual filings. These records document who owns the corporation, who governs it, and what decisions have been made on its behalf.

This is general information, not personalized legal advice. Share structure, shareholder agreements, and the legal maintenance of the minute book are legal work. Ashbridge is an accounting firm: we handle the accounting and tax side of what a minute book implies (share structure affects tax treatment, for instance) but drafting and maintaining the legal record itself belongs with a lawyer. If a question you have is really a legal question, we'll say so rather than guess at an answer.

HST and Payroll Considerations for a Newly Incorporated Business

Incorporating doesn't automatically require HST registration or a payroll account, both depend on what the business actually does. HST registration is generally required once a business crosses the small-supplier revenue threshold, though some businesses register earlier by choice to recover input tax credits. Payroll accounts come into play once the corporation has employees, including an owner who pays themselves a salary rather than dividends.

Both decisions have downstream effects on bookkeeping and on how straightforward the year-end corporate tax filing is. Bookkeeping set up with HST and payroll in mind from the start avoids a lot of the reconciliation work that shows up later when it wasn't.

Bank and Accounting Setup

Two practical steps do more for first-year cleanliness than almost anything else: open a dedicated business bank account before the corporation starts transacting, and set up a bookkeeping system, even a simple one, from the first transaction rather than backfilling it at year-end. Every corporate expense, deposit and transfer should run through the business account, not a personal one.

If the owner puts personal funds into the business, or the reverse, that should be tracked deliberately as a shareholder loan rather than left as an unexplained balance. Clean records here are what let a corporate tax accountant file efficiently instead of spending billable time reconstructing what happened.

Common First-Year Mistakes

These are the patterns that turn a simple incorporation into an expensive year-end, and they're avoidable with basic discipline early on. This is general education, not advice for your specific situation.

• Commingling personal and business funds. Paying business expenses from a personal card, or vice versa, without tracking it, the single most common source of messy books.
• Not opening a separate business bank account. Related to the above, and often the root cause of it.
• Missing HST registration when it's required. Realizing after the fact that revenue crossed the threshold months earlier.
• Disorganized receipts. Expenses claimed without support, discovered as a gap only when the return is being prepared.
• Not tracking shareholder loans. Money moving between the owner and the corporation with no record of which way it went or why.

Realtors incorporating a Personal Real Estate Corporation face a few of these same questions with extra nuance around commission flow, see the realtor and PREC accounting page if that's your situation.