The email arrived on a Thursday morning. A representative from Revenu Québec, requesting source deduction records for a two-year period.

The office manager read it twice. Then she walked over to the filing cabinet.

The first year was there. A folder, labelled, mostly complete. The second year was split between a binder on the shelf, a subfolder in a shared drive nobody had touched since she'd set it up, and an email thread from a site supervisor who'd since moved on.

Thirty days to produce all of it.

What the law actually requires

Payroll recordkeeping obligations in Quebec come from multiple directions at once: provincial tax rules under Revenu Québec, federal source deduction requirements under the CRA, and the Act respecting labour standards.

The prudent working rule: keep everything for at least 6 years from the end of the fiscal year in question. For federal records — T4s, source deduction remittances — the standard is 7 years. Your accountant can confirm what applies to your specific situation, but think in years, not months.

Six to seven years. For every employee. Every pay cycle. Every site.

And it's not just the year-end slips. The full trail: hours logged, rates applied, premiums and multipliers calculated, deductions withheld, remittances made. For employees working under Quebec's construction sector framework, the monthly hours reports and occupation records are part of that package too. The CCQ publishes the recordkeeping expectations for unionized construction workers on its website.

What "archived" looks like at most small contractors

Most small construction companies don't really archive payroll records. They accumulate them.

There's the filing cabinet. The bookkeeper's desktop folder. The shared OneDrive file that got renamed twice, where nobody is sure which version is authoritative. Hand-signed paper timesheets stacked by month, or by site, or by employee — depending on whoever filed them that particular week.

When a review comes, the problem usually isn't that the records don't exist. It's that they're not findable. Not quickly. Not consistently across the whole period under review.

That's what audits surface.

What you need to be able to produce

For each pay period, your records need to allow full reconstruction of:

Hours worked: date, duration, site or project, type of work
Applicable rates: base hourly rate, premiums (evenings, weekends, holidays), any sector-specific adjustments
Withholding calculations: provincial tax, federal tax, employment insurance, pension contributions
Remittances: amounts paid to employees, amounts sent to the relevant agencies
Annual slips: Relevé 1, T4, and any applicable annexes

What disappears first

In practice, the records that go missing most often:

Timesheets from the first half of a season — filed in a hurry, never found again
Calculations for one-off premiums (travel time, height premium, remote-site work) that weren't documented at the time of the pay run
Hand-corrected payroll adjustments made after the fact, with no formal paper trail

Building something reliable without overhauling everything

You don't need to rebuild your whole system at once. A few decisions change the equation permanently.

Pick one place. A shared cloud folder with a clear subfolder structure by year and month. Not two locations, not local copies that drift apart. Everyone knows where to go and where to put things.

File when you process. When a pay cycle is finalized, save the records right then — not in the pile to be filed later, not next week. Two minutes at the time of processing beats three hours reconstructing it under pressure.

Document corrections. When a payroll is adjusted after the fact, write down the date, the reason, and who authorized it. An email is fine — as long as it's stored with the rest of that period's records.

Do a once-a-year walkthrough. In December or January, spend thirty minutes going through the previous year's folder. Gaps are easier to spot cold than in the middle of a busy season.

When digital takes care of it automatically

The real advantage of digital payroll isn't speed. It's the audit trail.

When hours are clocked from a phone, every entry is timestamped and tied to the employee, the site, and the occupation. When rates apply automatically, there's a record of exactly which rates were used for which cycle. When the system generates a report, there's a saved, dated version — always retrievable.

The office manager at Construction Bardeau X-Y doesn't search for anything at month-end anymore. Everything is already there, structured, ready to produce on demand. Not because she's doing more work — because the time-entry process automatically generates an archivable record as a byproduct of normal operations.

If you want to see what that looks like for a team your size, Heuro's features are here — or get in touch if you'd rather walk through it first.

Key takeaways

Quebec payroll recordkeeping obligations generally require keeping records for 6 to 7 years — not a few months
It's not just the year-end slips: hours, rates, premiums, withholdings, corrections — all of it needs to be producible on request
Most small contractors accumulate documents rather than archive them — reviews surface the gaps
One location, a filing habit at time-of-processing, and an annual spot-check are enough to stay compliant
A digital payroll tool generates archivable records automatically, as a byproduct of normal operations