How to do proof of income as a self-employed Canadian sponsor?

[ships2g]

I'm soon going to sponsor my spouse immigrating from the USA, and I was working on the background info forms (IMM 5532 E).

Most of the questions were pretty straightforward, but I'm wondering about the monthly gross salary/income:

1. To what extent do I remove my business expenses before reporting income? That would be more consistent with my income taxes, but on my taxes I've deliberately counted a lot of expenses as sole-proprietorship business expenses where that seemed reasonable, to reduce my tax owed. So that would make my income look much lower.
   
   • The figures are something like...
     • ~$5000/mo gross revenue for the business
     • ~$3200/mo income if I only remove the most obvious business expenses
     • ~$1500/mo or less if we're trying to make it line up with my taxes
       
2. What would be good for supporting documents? Business bank account statements for the past year? Or would I also need to include tax returns? Or something else? (This obviously connects with Question 1)
   
   
3. Given that my business income fluctuates, I assume an average would make sense?

This is my first post, but I've already found these forums very helpful, so huge appreciation everybody

 

[canuck_in_uk]

I'm soon going to sponsor my spouse immigrating from the USA, and I was working on the background info forms (IMM 5532 E).

Most of the questions were pretty straightforward, but I'm wondering about the monthly gross salary/income:

1. To what extent do I remove my business expenses before reporting income? That would be more consistent with my income taxes, but on my taxes I've deliberately counted a lot of expenses as sole-proprietorship business expenses where that seemed reasonable, to reduce my tax owed. So that would make my income look much lower.
   • The figures are something like...
     • ~$5000/mo gross revenue for the business
     • ~$3200/mo income if I only remove the most obvious business expenses
     • ~$1500/mo or less if we're trying to make it line up with my taxes
2. What would be good for supporting documents? Business bank account statements for the past year? Or would I also need to include tax returns? Or something else? (This obviously connects with Question 1)
   
   
3. Given that my business income fluctuates, I assume an average would make sense?

This is my first post, but I've already found these forums very helpful, so huge appreciation everybody

Just an observation, "Deliberately counted a lot of expenses" sounds like a sentence that CRA would be very interested in exploring. 70% of income going to expenses is very high.

You need to include your most recent NOA or Option C. You can include some bank statements as well.