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Accounting & earnings

Teach the lesson. The books write themselves.

Accounting software for BC driving instructors. Every lesson already knows its date, length, student and fee — so your revenue, unpaid balances, GST and business kilometres total themselves as you go, and your accountant gets a clean CSV at year end.

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Sample year — your figures total themselves from the lessons you actually taught.

The problem

Generic accounting software doesn't know what a lesson is.

A driving instructor's books are unusual in a specific way: revenue arrives in dozens of small, near-identical amounts — some cash at the curb, some by card, some not paid yet — and the vehicle is both the workplace and the largest deduction. General bookkeeping software has no concept of any of that, so you enter every lesson twice: once to teach it, once to account for it.

copilotBC starts from the lesson instead. The record you have to keep anyway is also the bookkeeping entry — so the second job disappears.

What it tracks

Your income side, current without you touching it.

Revenue, by period
Every completed lesson carries a fee — the one you set, or your default rate for its duration. Gross and collected are totalled separately, so you always know the gap between billed and banked.
Who still owes you
Unpaid lessons roll into a running outstanding balance per student. See the total at a glance, and optionally stop a student with a balance from booking again until it clears.
GST inside your fees
BC lesson prices are quoted tax-inclusive. If you're registered, copilotBC extracts the 5% already embedded in each fee rather than bolting it on top — one figure, used consistently on screen and in the export.
Business kilometres
Start and end odometer readings are logged at the curb during the lesson, so your kilometre total is captured live rather than reconstructed from memory in April.
Cancellation & no-show fees
A charged late-cancellation or no-show is real revenue, so it's counted as income — the most commonly lost line in a hand-kept instructor ledger.
Income that isn't a lesson
Custom bills, deposits and one-off charges are recorded as their own income lines with their own notes — a package payment doesn't have to be forced into a lesson-shaped box.

Year end

One export. Your accountant does the rest.

The year-end export is a plain CSV that opens in Excel, Numbers, Google Sheets or any bookkeeping package — one line per income lesson, then the totals your accountant asks for first. Paid lessons are frozen at what you charged, so raising your rates next spring can't retroactively inflate last year's revenue. The footnotes travel in the file: which figures are estimates, how the GST column was derived, and that the kilometre total is lesson distance only.

1 file to hand over — not a shoebox, not a spreadsheet you rebuilt from memory the week before the deadline.

Getting paid

Card payments land in your account, not ours.

Students can pay for a lesson by card through Stripe. The charge goes directly to you — you're the merchant for the lesson, the funds settle into your own Stripe account, and copilotBC never takes custody of your students' money. Cash and e-transfer still work exactly as before; you mark those paid in a tap.

Straight to your Stripe account

You own the funds, the fees and any refunds. copilotBC is the software, not the money's middleman.

Paid status updates itself

A paid lesson flips to paid, leaves your outstanding balance, and joins your collected total — the bookkeeping consequence of getting paid happens on its own.

Honest scope

What this is not.

Not a general ledger
copilotBC covers income. It doesn't track expenses, fuel, insurance, payroll or depreciation, and it doesn't do double-entry bookkeeping.
It doesn't file anything
No GST remittance, no T1, no CRA connection. It gets your numbers organised; a human still files them.
It is not tax advice
The figures are a record of what you charged and collected. How they're treated on a return is your accountant's call, not ours.
Mileage is lesson distance only
Driving to meet a student isn't captured, and a sole proprietor deducts prorated actual vehicle costs rather than a flat per-kilometre allowance.

Questions

Common questions about instructor bookkeeping.

Is there accounting software made for driving instructors?

Most instructors use general small-business software and re-key their lessons into it. copilotBC captures the income side as a by-product of teaching instead, then exports for the accountant. If you already love your bookkeeping app, the CSV drops straight into it.

Do I have to be GST-registered to use it?

No. If you're under the small-supplier threshold, leave GST off and the tax column simply doesn't appear. Turn it on the year you register.

What if I take cash?

Plenty of instructors do. Mark the lesson paid and it's recorded like any other collected fee — the export doesn't care how the money arrived, only that it did.

Does the fee show up on my ICBC-aligned lesson record too?

Yes — the fee charged is one of the fields BC's record-keeping regulation asks for, so it's on the printed student training record as well as in your earnings. See compliance.

Where does my financial data live?

In Google Cloud's Toronto region, in Canada — encrypted, isolated per instructor, and covered by the same controls as your student records. More on security.

Teach the lesson. The books write themselves.

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Related: booking software for driving instructors · the pre-trip and lesson checklist · frequently asked questions

copilotBC is software, not an accountant, and nothing here is tax advice. Confirm your filing figures with a professional.