Wedding planner payroll: is your day-of coordinator really a contractor?

The day-of coordinator question, answered by facts

CRA decides employee-versus-contractor by examining the actual working relationship: who controls the work, who supplies the tools, whether the worker can profit or lose, and how integrated they are into your business. A coordinator who works only your weddings, at your day rate, following your run-sheet system after you trained her on it, with her expenses reimbursed — that is an employee, whatever her invoice says. A coordinator with her own planning company, her own insurance, her own clients, who quotes you a fee to absorb your overflow weekend — that is a genuine subcontractor. The written contract matters only when the facts on the ground back it up.

Running the employee model properly

If your regulars are employees, the machinery is light but exact. TD1s collected before the first event, CPP, EI, and tax withheld on every pay, vacation pay at 4% on each cheque under a written agreement — a natural fit for seasonal work — and T4s by the end of February. Wedding scheduling collides with the ESA in two specific places: long-weekend Saturdays mean public-holiday interactions, where an employee working the holiday gets premium pay plus holiday pay or regular wages plus a substitute day; and a 14-hour wedding day creates no overtime on its own, because Ontario's threshold is 44 hours in the work week — it is the double-header weekends in peak season that cross the line. When the season ends, ROEs go out within five calendar days of the interruption of earnings.

Running the contractor model properly

If your day-of help is genuinely independent, protect that status with paper and behaviour. A services agreement that states scope and fee per event, their invoices in their business name, a certificate of their own insurance in your file, and no direction of their hours beyond the event timeline itself. Fees for services of $500 or more in a year are reported on a T4A, and expect HST on their invoices once their revenues pass the $30,000 small-supplier threshold. The cost of getting this wrong lands entirely on you: a reclassification means both shares of CPP and EI retroactively, plus penalties and interest — and it usually surfaces when a former coordinator applies for EI and Service Canada asks why there is no ROE.

Vendor pass-throughs are neither payroll nor T4A territory

The florist, the photographer, the string quartet — money you move from a couple's budget to their vendors is a supplier payment, not compensation for services to your business. Keep those flows in client-level ledgers so pass-throughs never inflate your own revenue or trigger slip questions; the build for that sits on our wedding planner bookkeeping page. Your own pay from an incorporated studio is the standing salary-versus-dividend decision, worth modelling once your season stabilizes. And destination work adds a wrinkle worth flagging early: hiring a US-based coordinator or paying US vendors for a Cabo or Napa wedding raises withholding and reporting questions that Canadian payroll never touches — that file lives in our cross-border guide for event planners.

Source: CRA — RC4110, Employee or Self-Employed?.