What a CRA review actually looks for
A CRA review is mostly a records exam: can every number be traced to a document, and does the story hold together? Clean books make it short; gaps make it long.
The traceability test
Statement line → ledger entry → source document. Every hop should be a click, not a search of a filing cabinet. Six years of records is the standard retention expectation — keep them reachable, not just kept.
Sequences and gaps
Invoice numbering with holes invites questions deletion cannot answer. Reversal by credit note — never deletion — keeps sequences complete and stories intact.
Sales tax coherence
Collected minus input credits should equal remittances, period by period. The tax reports that build your return are the same ones a reviewer walks — being able to regenerate them on demand is the whole game.
What a reviewer is really testing
An audit is a test of whether your records can explain themselves. Not whether they are beautiful — whether a number on a return traces to a statement, a statement to entries, and an entry to a document that existed at the time. Books that can do that survive scrutiny even when they contain mistakes.
Books that cannot do it invite the reviewer to substitute their own estimate, which rarely favours the business.
Corrections are fine; erasures are not
Every business makes errors and corrects them. What matters is that the correction is visible: what was there, what replaced it, when, and by whom. A ledger where corrections silently overwrite history looks tidier and is far weaker under review.
Retention obligations mean the trail must survive for years, so it needs to live in the system rather than in someone's memory.
What SeroBooks does with this
Superseded journal lines move to the audit trail with the document they belonged to, the reason, the timestamp and the author — the ledger stays clean to read while history stays complete to audit. Period locks are enforced at the ledger, so a signed month cannot be quietly disturbed.
Every statement drills to its entries and every entry to its document, which is exactly the path a reviewer walks.
See it in your own numbers.
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