Paid duty, and keeping your own record of it

Who pays you changes everything

There are two arrangements, and they are not treated the same way.

Your service pays you. This is the common one. The organiser books the assignment through the force, the force pays you, and the Canada Revenue Agency treats those earnings as employment income — with CPP and EI withheld the same way they are on your regular pay.

The organiser pays you directly. Where an event organiser contracts an officer and pays them rather than paying the service, the treatment is different, and what applies depends on the arrangement.

Which one you are in is worth knowing, because it decides what shows up on your statements at the end of the year and what you may need to account for yourself. Your service and the CRA can tell you; a website cannot.

What the record is actually for

If your paid duty runs through the service, you are not usually filing it as business income — so the record is not a tax return waiting to happen. It is something more immediate: a way to check that what you were paid matches what you worked.

Paid duty is booked weeks ahead, worked once, and paid some pay periods later. Assignments get cancelled, hours run long, an organiser disputes a rate. By the time the money lands, most people are relying on memory.

A record fixes that. The date, the hours you actually worked, the rate you were quoted, the assignment, and whether the money has arrived.

Assignments that never got paid

This is the one people find first. Every job carries a status — booked, worked, waiting on payment, paid — and anything still waiting stays visible until it is settled.

You do not have to remember that a shift from two months ago was never paid. It is sitting there in red on the employer's own page.

Kilometres

Whether you can claim anything for the drive depends on your service, your collective agreement and the arrangement you worked under — and on whether you took a patrol car or your own. Some services reimburse, some do not, and some charge you for taking a marked unit to a paid duty job.

The app records the kilometres against the job with whatever rate you set, and totals them for any period. Whether they are claimable is a question for your service or an accountant.

What a complete record looks like

• The date, and the hours you actually worked rather than the hours booked
• Who the assignment was for — the site, the arena, the organiser
• The rate you were quoted and the total it comes to
• Kilometres, and which vehicle you used
• Whether you have been paid, and when

All of it stays on your phone. When you need it on paper — for your own records, for a dispute, or for whoever does your return — any date range exports as a PDF with every assignment listed and the totals worked out.