RL-24 slips and tax receipts: what a daycare owes parents

Every winter, daycares get the same question from parents: "when do I get my tax paper?" Behind that question sit two different documents, only one of which concerns every daycare in the country.

This guide separates the two, describes what each contains, and proposes a realistic calendar so February is not spent correcting amounts.

Two documents, two administrations

The first is the childcare expense receipt, which any daycare issues to families for their federal return. It is not an imposed official form: it is a document the daycare produces itself, carrying the expected particulars.

The second is the RL-24 slip, specific to Quebec. It is an official Revenu Québec form with numbered boxes, produced by Quebec childcare services so parents can claim their provincial tax credit.

A New Brunswick daycare therefore produces the first only. A Montreal daycare produces both.

What a childcare receipt contains

The receipt must let the tax administration tie an expense to a child, a payer and a service provider. In practice it carries:

• the daycare's name and address, along with its business number,
• the child's name and the name of the person who paid,
• the year covered and the total amount paid during that year,
• the signature or identification of the person issuing the receipt.

The boxes of the RL-24

The RL-24 is more structured than the federal receipt because it separates what was paid from what was subsidised. The boxes follow that logic.

Box D causes the most discrepancies: a subsidy confirmed late or corrected mid-year must show in the slip, otherwise the net amount given to the parent will not match what the administration expects.

The rule that avoids half the errors

A tax receipt is built from amounts actually collected during the calendar year, not amounts billed. The distinction looks theoretical until a family pays December's invoice in January: that amount belongs to the year of payment, not the year of the invoice.

A daycare producing receipts from its invoice list therefore gets it systematically wrong for families behind on payment — precisely the families who will check their receipt closely.

A calendar that holds

February's work is prepared throughout the year. Three moments are enough.

• Through the year: record each payment on its real date, including cash payments and transfers.
• In December: check incomplete files, addresses and payer details before documents go out.
• In January: produce documents for all children at once, then handle special cases, rather than the reverse.

That last habit changes the workload: handling two hundred files one by one takes a week; producing two hundred and correcting five takes a morning.

Who receives the document when parents are separated

This is the situation that generates the most February calls. The receipt attaches to the person who paid, not to the one holding custody nor the one listed first in the file. If two parents each pay a share, each is entitled to a document covering their own contribution.

Two precautions avoid the argument. The first is to record, for each payment, who made it, rather than attaching every payment to the child's file. The second is never to edit a receipt already issued at a parent's request: cancel and reissue, keeping a trace of both.

Keeping the records afterwards

An issued receipt does not close the file. In an audit, the daycare must be able to show what the amount rested on: invoices, payments collected, subsidies applied.

• Keep accounting records for the period required by the tax administration, independently of your internal data deletion rules.
• Keep the issued version of the document, not only the data used to produce it: a template changed the following year does not reconstruct the original.
• Record the issue date and the recipient, which immediately settles the case of a parent who says they received nothing.

This retention coexists with personal information obligations: financial data is kept longer than day-to-day data, which is why retention periods differ by document type.

Further reading

The Canada Revenue Agency documents child care expenses deductible federally. For Quebec, the Ministère de la Famille and Revenu Québec set out the obligations specific to the province's childcare services.

Sources

• Canada Revenue Agency
• Quebec Ministère de la Famille