CPA Skills

Tax Planning, Estate Freeze Design & CUSMA Compliance for Canadian SMEs

The Apex CPA Skill delivers AI-powered tax planning analysis for Canadian CPA firms advising SME owners approaching succession or sale. The skill runs three modules in parallel — estate freeze and LCGE multiplication, corporate tax optimization, and CUSMA tariff compliance — producing structured outputs that a CPA can review, validate, and deliver to the client file in a fraction of the time manual analysis would require. All outputs are framed as planning strategies, not filed tax advice, and require sign-off by a CPA registered with CPA Canada before implementation.

Module 1 — Estate Freeze & LCGE Multiplication The skill designs ITA s.86 estate freeze structures step by step: share exchange mechanics, T2054 election checklist, QSBC purification assessment, and family trust or direct share issuance to eligible family members. For each family member, it produces a LCGE multiplication table showing the $1,250,000 exemption available per person, the 24-month holding period and QSBC test status, and the estimated combined tax saving at the applicable provincial rate. It also calculates the cost-of-delay — the additional tax exposure accumulated each year a freeze is not implemented — and flags TOSI risk under ITA s.120.1 for any adult family members receiving dividends or capital gains from the reorganized structure.

Module 2 — Corporate Tax Optimization The skill normalizes owner compensation against market-rate equivalents, assesses RDTOH balances and optimal dividend timing for refundable tax recovery, confirms GRIP pools before any eligible dividend declarations, and identifies Capital Dividend Account (CDA) balances that can be distributed tax-free before a sale closes. It also assesses the Small Business Deduction position under ITA s.125 and flags passive investment income grinding the SBD, recommending Holdco intercorporate dividend strategies where applicable.

Module 3 — CUSMA Tariff Compliance For clients with US revenue or US-sourced inputs, the skill audits HS code classifications against the Canadian Customs Tariff using the General Rules of Interpretation, calculates Regional Value Content under both the Transaction Value and Net Cost methods, runs the steel and aluminum 70% North American origin test, and produces a completed Annex 5-A certification of origin template for each qualifying product. Recoverable tariffs — those paid on goods that qualify for CUSMA duty-free treatment but lack documentation — are quantified in dollars and modelled as normalized EBITDA add-backs in the CBV valuation.

Who this skill is for: CPA partners and managers at Canadian public accounting firms working on succession planning, estate planning, or owner-managed business advisory files. The skill is not sold to business owners directly.

Our Vision

We believe the next decade of Canadian business succession will be won or lost on the quality of professional advice available to the 1.2 million SME owners approaching exit — and that the biggest constraint on that advice today is not expertise, but time. Canada's licensed professionals — its CPAs, CBVs, CEPA advisors, CFPs, and CFA portfolio managers — carry the knowledge required to navigate an estate freeze, a business valuation, a CUSMA tariff audit, a retirement income plan, and a post-exit investment strategy. What they lack is the analytical infrastructure to deliver all of that, at the depth it deserves, within the economics of a mid-market professional practice. Our vision is to close that gap. By building AI-powered skills that run the analytical heavy lifting behind each professional discipline — and delivering those tools exclusively to licensed professionals, never to end clients — Apex Invest AI acts as a force multiplier for the advisors who are already trusted by Canadian business owners. We are not replacing professional judgment. We are creating the conditions in which that judgment can be applied at the highest possible level, on every file, for every client, every time.