In 2008 and 2009, my wife and I hired a nanny a few days a week to take care of our three children. Nothing exciting there. Part of hiring a nanny is that you have to deduct and remit taxes, CPP, and EI. All easy stuff; I’ve taken a payroll course before and the calculators were available online.

I wrote some scripts to help me out, which I eventually improved to the point where I had a fully functional payroll system. I put it online at SmallPayroll.ca thinking I’d be able to charge a few bucks for people to use it. Even though our nanny moved on in the summer and we found a day care, I’ve kept on improving the site. I may be biased, but I think it’s a pretty good system for helping people in a similar situation do their payroll.

On Friday I got a piece of mail from the Canada Revenue Agency, saying there was a problem with the T4 I submitted for my nanny in 2008 (2008! It’s almost 2010!). We only started in November so this was before I had written the first script and everything was manual. Of course I couldn’t find any of my paperwork from back then, and with a recent basement flood it could be anywhere.

Fortunately the problem ended up being on CRA’s end, but this incident highlighted how helpful a SaaS such as my own small payroll system would have been. All the data is there online and I would have known the calculations were correct because software was doing them.