A bad debt is an amount owed to your business that has become uncollectible, allowing you to write it off and often recover the tax already remitted on it.
When a customer will not or cannot pay, the receivable is written off as a bad debt. On the income statement this reduces your profit; for tax the write-off is generally deductible provided the amount was previously included in income and you have made genuine efforts to collect.
There is a second recovery most businesses miss: if you already remitted GST/HST on the original invoice, you can claim a bad-debt adjustment to recover the tax portion you never actually collected. Timing and documentation of the write-off matter, so the decision to declare a debt bad should be recorded.
A client owes you $2,260 ($2,000 plus $260 HST) and goes out of business. You write off the $2,000 as a deductible bad debt and claim a $260 bad-debt adjustment on your next HST return to recover the tax you already remitted.
Our certified accounting firm handles this for businesses and individuals across Canada, at fixed fees with no surprises.
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