How to Merge a Client's T4, RL-1 and RL-31 Slips Into One PDF

Short answer: Sort the slips before you merge them, not after. Put federal income slips first (T4, T4A, T5), then the matching Québec RL slips that mirror the same income (RL-1, RL-2, RL-3), then credit-support documents including the RL-31, then loose receipts. Merge that order into a single bookmarked PDF, and do the merge on your own computer rather than a free online tool — these pages carry your client's social insurance number.

A Québec client rarely sends you a tidy package. You get a T4 as a portal download, an RL-1 that arrived by mail and was photographed on a kitchen table, an RL-31 the landlord emailed in March, and eight receipts named IMG_4471.jpg. Each came from a different issuer on a different schedule, so "all the slips" is never one moment in time — it is a pile that accumulates for six weeks.

The question this page answers is the narrow, practical one: given that pile, what order do the documents go in, and how do you get them into one file you can actually review?

Why these three slips arrive separately

Québec is the only province that administers its own personal income tax and collects its own provincial source deductions. The practical consequence for a preparer is that a single client's employment income generates two slips from two different tax administrations, and the housing credit generates a third from a party that is not a tax administration at all.

The RL-31 is the one that goes missing. It does not come from an employer or a bank — it comes from a landlord, who may be an individual with a single rental unit and no payroll software. Revenu Québec requires it from any owner who leased a dwelling for which rent was payable on 31 December, and the slip is what allows an eligible tenant on the lease that day to claim the credit (Revenu Québec, RL-31 slip obligations).

The deadlines that shape when the pile is complete

Knowing the issuing deadlines tells you when to stop waiting and start chasing. The federal rule is stated plainly by the CRA:

"The filing due date is the last day of February after the preceding calendar year."

— Canada Revenue Agency, When to file information returns

Québec's RL slip deadline lands in the same window — the end of February — which is why late February is when the pile suddenly becomes reviewable. When the last day of February falls on a weekend, the deadline rolls to the next business day; for the 2025 tax year both the T4 and the RL slips moved to Monday 2 March 2026.

The deadline has teeth on the issuing side, which is useful context when a client says their employer "hasn't gotten around to it": the CRA can charge $25 per day for each T4 slip not given to an employee on time, with a minimum penalty of $100 and a maximum of $2,500. A client chasing a missing T4 is not being unreasonable.

The order to merge them in

Every firm has its own binder convention, and consistency beats correctness here. If you do not already have one, this order works because it follows the sequence a preparer actually keys the return in — federal income, then the Québec mirror, then credits:

1. Federal income slips — T4, then T4A, then investment slips (T5, T3, T5008).
2. Québec mirror slips — RL-1 immediately after the T4 it corresponds to, then RL-2 (retirement income), RL-3 (investment income).
3. Credit support — RL-31 for the solidarity tax credit, then RL-24 (childcare), then medical and donation receipts.
4. Everything else — notices of assessment, instalment records, correspondence.

The single highest-value habit is keeping each RL-1 adjacent to its matching T4 rather than grouping all federal slips together and all Québec slips together. When the two are side by side, a reviewer can compare the employment income boxes in one glance and catch a mismatched or duplicated employer immediately. When they are forty pages apart, nobody checks.

Three ways to actually build the file

1. Manually, in a PDF editor

Rename each file so it sorts correctly (01-T4-Employer.pdf, 02-RL1-Employer.pdf), drag them into Acrobat or Preview, reorder the thumbnails, add bookmarks, export. This is reliable and costs nothing beyond the editor licence. It also takes 15–25 minutes per client once photographs need rotating, and it is the step that quietly consumes an afternoon in March.

2. A free online merge tool

Fast, and the wrong tool for this job. A T4 carries the client's name, address, social insurance number and income. Uploading it to an ad-supported website to save ten minutes means client tax data transits and is stored on a third-party server you have no agreement with. Most professional obligations around confidentiality are difficult to reconcile with that, and it is not a defensible answer if a client ever asks where their documents went.

3. On-device classification and merge

PDF Insight was built for exactly this pile. It reads each PDF or photo on your own machine — including scanned and sideways-photographed slips, through on-device OCR — recognises whether a page is a T4, an RL-1, an RL-31 or a receipt, orders them, and exports one bookmarked client PDF. Nothing is uploaded to decide what a page is; the classification runs locally, which means the workflow is the same whether you are in the office or on a train with no connection.

The honest framing: this is a time problem, not a capability problem. Acrobat can produce the same file. The difference is whether assembling it takes twenty minutes of dragging thumbnails per client or a couple of minutes of checking the tool's proposed order.

Why "just merge them" is worth getting right

Document handling is now the manual residue of a process that is otherwise almost entirely electronic. In the 2025 tax-filing season the CRA processed 33,839,390 individual income tax returns, of which 93% were filed electronically — 60% through EFILE by preparers and 33% through NETFILE (CRA, individual income tax return statistics). Only 7% arrived on paper.

The return goes out electronically in minutes. The slips still come in as a shoebox. That gap — a fully digital filing pipeline fed by a manual document-assembly step — is where a Québec preparer's March evenings go, and it is the only part of the workflow that has not been automated for them.