Updated Checked by the Tax-Services.ca editorial team How we check
To train staff on new accounting software, start with the tasks people do every week and build a short set of practice cases with answers you already know. Lectures on features fade in days. A practice case that has a right answer tells you in ten minutes who’s ready and who isn’t.
What should you train first?
Not the menus. Begin with the five or six jobs that would hurt if they went wrong: entering a bill, coding tax on it, approving a payment, running payroll, closing a month and pulling a report. Anything else can wait until those work.
Give each job an owner. One person who is good at it beats six people who are vaguely familiar with it, and it stops two staff from fixing the same entry in different ways.
How do you build practice cases with known answers?
Use the calculators as your answer key. Here is a payroll case. Make a pretend Ontario employee paid $25 an hour for 40 hours a week. The hourly to salary calculator turns that into $52,000 a year, or $2,000 every two weeks.
Now the trainee runs that person through the new payroll screen. The take-home pay calculator says to expect about $41,641 a year after tax, CPP and EI, which is roughly $1,601.59 per biweekly pay. If the trainee lands within a few cents, they’ve got it. If they’re $200 off, you’ve found a setup problem or a keying habit, and you’ve found it before a real paycheque went out.
| Practice case | Known answer to check against |
|---|---|
| Ontario employee, $2,000 every two weeks | Income tax about $254.82, CPP $110.99, EI $32.60 per pay (payroll deductions calculator) |
| Same employee, employer side | About $156.63 added by you, about $555 to remit per pay (payroll remittance calculator) |
| $2,400 equipment bill in Ontario | $312 of HST at 13% (GST/HST calculator) |
These are estimates for simple cases. Your own payroll setup may add items the calculators leave out, such as benefits or workers’ compensation.
Why should training material double as documentation?
Because the CRA asks for something very close to it. Its circular on electronic record keeping (IC05-1) says your documentation should describe how the business system operates, how transactions are created and processed, how standard reports are built, and what controls stop records being altered or lost.
So when you write a one-page procedure for “how we enter a supplier bill”, keep it. Date it. Note the software name and version, which the CRA also asks you to record. That page is a training sheet today and part of your documentation later, and you’ve only written it once.
How do you keep the training from fading?
Pair a fast learner with a slow one, but don’t make it the fast learner’s whole job. Ten minutes at the start of a shift works better than a half-day session. Re-run the practice cases after every software update, since a change in a tax table or a screen can shift the answers.
A short log helps more than people expect. Who was trained on what, on which date, and which practice cases they passed. If an error turns up in month four, you’ll know where to look first.
What does a first week of training look like?
Take Priya, who runs the office of a four-person plumbing company in Halifax. Day one, she sets up three practice cases from the table above and has everyone enter the same equipment bill. Day two, the person who handles bills does five real ones with Priya watching. Day three is payroll: the pretend employee, the known answer, a few bucks of tolerance. By Friday she has a one-page procedure for each job and a note of who passed what. Nothing fancy, and nobody sat through a lecture.
What mistakes come up most often?
Training everyone on everything, for one. A clerk who only enters bills doesn’t need payroll access, and giving it to them adds risk with no payoff. Another is skipping the old system’s export. Keep the old data readable until the six-year retention period, counted from the end of the last tax year the records relate to, has run out.
And don’t train on live data if you can avoid it. A sandbox or a test company file lets people make mistakes cheaply. We couldn’t verify which products offer a test mode, so check with your vendor.
How do you know someone is ready to run payroll alone?
When they’ve passed the practice case twice, on different days, without help, and can explain why the answer is what it is. Matching a number once can be luck. Explaining a mismatch, such as why CPP stops partway through the year for a high earner, shows they understand the pay run and aren’t just following the screen. Until then, have a second person look over each run before it’s released.
Sources, and how we checked them
Payroll and HST figures come from this site’s calculators, which use 2026 federal and provincial data, so they are estimates. The documentation and retention points come from the Canada Revenue Agency‘s Information Circular IC05-1 (February 2020) and its business page on keeping records. Priya and her plumbing company are made up.
Frequently asked questions
Does the CRA require formal training for accounting software?
We found no CRA page that sets a training rule. The CRA does expect documentation of how your system works.
How long should training take?
That depends on the tools. Short sessions on the weekly jobs, plus practice cases, work better than one long day.
What should a training case include?
A realistic transaction with a known answer, such as a payroll run or an HST purchase you can check against a calculator.
Should staff train on live data?
Avoid it where you can. Use a test file if your software offers one, and ask the vendor.
Should I keep the training notes?
Yes. They can serve as system documentation, which the CRA describes in its electronic record keeping circular.
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