Physician CFO services: treat your MPC like the pension it actually is

Why a physician with stable billings still needs CFO work

Because for an incorporated physician the leverage is not revenue growth — OHIP billings and clinic schedules are what they are — it is structure. The gap between a well-run MPC and a drifting one shows up in how much is paid out versus retained, what the retained money earns, what the clinic overhead deal really costs, and whether retirement arrives as a plan or a scramble. None of that appears on a T2; all of it compounds for twenty years. The same holds for physicians juggling locum work, hospital stipends, and clinic billings — several income streams, one corporation, one plan.

We run this as an annual compensation and investment plan with quarterly check-ins, coordinated with your financial advisor and our own tax team. Fixed fees, quoted after a discovery call.

Salary or dividends: choose by destination, not habit

Integration makes the raw tax cost of salary and dividends roughly similar, so the real decision is about what each one unlocks. The question is not which is cheaper this year but where you want money to land over a career:

Most physicians land on a blend, revisited annually against cash needs and contribution room. One caution: paying dividends to family-member shareholders is generally caught by the tax on split income rules unless a specific exception applies — we flag it, model it, and never assume the old income-splitting playbook still works.

Investing inside the MPC without grinding the small business deduction

Retained earnings are the engine, but passive investment income above $50,000 of adjusted aggregate investment income starts eroding the corporation's small business deduction — five dollars of SBD limit lost per dollar over the line, fully gone at $150,000. A portfolio built with no regard for that threshold quietly raises the tax rate on your active billings. The response is asset location, not abstinence: which holdings sit corporately versus in RRSP and TFSA room, how capital gains feed the capital dividend account for tax-free extraction, where corporately owned life insurance genuinely fits, and when realizing gains deliberately beats letting them accrue into a worse year. Note that the $50,000 runway is measured across associated corporations, so adding a holding company does not reset it.

We coordinate this with your portfolio manager rather than replacing them — our job is the corporate and tax architecture the portfolio lives inside.

Retirement: RRSP, IPP, and the order you drain the accounts

Past roughly age 40, an Individual Pension Plan often allows larger deductible contributions than an RRSP for a physician with T4 salary history — funded by the MPC, deductible to it, and creditor-separated from the practice. Whether it beats simply investing corporately depends on your age, salary pattern, and appetite for the administration, so we model it rather than defaulting either way. The bigger lever is decumulation order: which mix of corporate dividends, RRSP or RRIF draws, CPP timing, and TFSA use empties the structure at the lowest lifetime rate while managing OAS clawback. Physicians who leave that sequencing to chance usually pay for it in their seventies. Unlike a dentist or pharmacist, most physicians have no practice to sell at the end — the corporation itself is the asset — which makes the drawdown plan the exit plan.

Clinic cost-sharing: structure it before you sign it

A cost-sharing arrangement should let each physician run their own practice while splitting rent, staff, and equipment — but the details decide whether it works. We review how costs are actually driven — rooms, hours, staff time — before you agree to a flat percentage that subsidizes a heavier user. Watch the HST trap: medical services are exempt, so a clinic entity that hires the staff and charges physicians an administration fee can be making taxable supplies nobody priced in. And if part of your income is US locum work or cross-border telehealth, the treaty questions belong in the plan from the start — our cross-border guide for physicians covers that terrain, and our bookkeeping team keeps the MPC records that all of this planning depends on.