Do you buy your groceries separate?

[momof2cuties]

I have only been doing daycare for a few months so I'm not sure if I am doing this right. I buy my groceries each week, and buy my daycare stuff right along with my families groceries. I save the receipt and use a highlighter to cross off the items that are for daycare use. Save the receipts and put it in the slot marked 'groceries' in a folder and will give to my accountant come tax time.

[playfelt]

We have been told in many workshops given by revenue canada that you can not just use an arbitrary per day amount for meals that you have to use your bills/menu and determine based on specifics. I know in the US they have the per day option but we don't. Yes some of you will say that is what your accountant did and it was accepted but that also means the government accepted the amount you claimed for food and didn't audit you to find out how you arrived at that figure since if they did you would have had to show how you got to the $7 a day claim.

[sunnydays]

Do you mean that we have to calculate what we spent each day? Or do you mean that you have to calculate an average and then use that as your per day amount? I have menus and I have reciepts, but I am not sure how to go about figuring out how much each meal cost for each child...this seems very complicated.

We have been told in many workshops given by revenue canada that you can not just use an arbitrary per day amount for meals that you have to use your bills/menu and determine based on specifics. I know in the US they have the per day option but we don't. Yes some of you will say that is what your accountant did and it was accepted but that also means the government accepted the amount you claimed for food and didn't audit you to find out how you arrived at that figure since if they did you would have had to show how you got to the $7 a day claim.

[playfelt]

It is always going to be a guess in some ways. One option is to write out a typical menu and then cost that out for a total, divide by the number of people served and that will give you the average per person and then multiply that by the total number of meals served.

Another option is to add up all of the grocery bills and divide by the number of people that served and then multiply by the number of kids served.

In a pinch when I was running behind the times I took 2 months worth of grocery bills and just used those with the formula. Once I did meals all the ways to see which one was to my advantage and there was less than a $150 difference from one method to the other which is not a lot of money in the grand scheme of things since it will never be a precise science.

To do the cost per day method doing the menu will be your best. Make up a 3-6 week menue based on what you normally served and then cost it out. You probably do more repetition that you think in the sense of every Monday could be hamburg with something so one week with noodles and spagetti sauce, week two with box of hamburg helper, week three as meatloaf, etc. After you have done it a couple years you will figure out which method is the easiest for you.

If you use excell you can easily input the amount on the grocery receipts and add the formula totals the columns for you. The daily amount will vary for each person based on what they serve and that is why you can't use the arbitrary per day amount. The $7 is that red flag type of number in the sense that if you are claiming expenses a lot above that they will question you but you can claim pretty much anything below that and be ok it's just that you have be able to show them how you arrived at the number you are using should you be audited. That is the total key - no audit and any method works - get audited and you run the risk of being denied claims.

[jodaycare]

I order my daycare groceries through an online grocery service, that was it is all on one bill and easy to figure out.

[playfelt]

A big issue is when you are feeding some of your own children as part of the daycare group because the food you feed your own is not claimable - only the daycare child portion so that adds a new calculation to the mix.

[Momof4]

I do that too, but I go through the receipt and cross off personal items, then do a total of all the things that are left and write it at the top of the receipt with the date and keep all receipts just in case.