I don’t like having overrides.
Please allow the federal and provincial children’s credits to be switched between spouses without overrides. Currently the percentage requires an override as far as I can see.
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I thought I was missing something. I must have spent half an hour poking around looking for the way to allocate the provincial credit.
Is this going to be changed. Hoping so as it is a PITA.
This is an amount that we automatically optimize between spouses. That being said, if you choose to manually allocate a portion to each spouse you can leave the rest of the optimizations on and turn off fitness federally and provincially on the DepCredSum form, by setting the “Optimize” field to No (This field will show as an override intentionally as the rest of the optimizations are on and the user is selecting to manually allocate that specific credit). This will make all the percentage boxes edit to choose your attribution.
Note…that if you want no Optimizations for the return and want to manually allocate all credits…this can be turned off at the top of the Optimizations form :
~ Rob
I find your optimization splits the federal and provincial credits between spouses for no apparent benefit on a lot of occasions.
Getting the tuition transfer from a child to the parent of choice requires an override as well. I think my issue is really with overrides. I tend to equate an override with doing something that probably shouldn’t be done. Can we have optimizations on but allow yes/no to optimize not require an override. I believe there was more flexibility in this regard in previous years.
I’m not sure if it is just me, but I was able to get rid of most of these “over-ridden” fields (such as allocating the fitness credits, Schedule 12 Healthy Homes Credit, etc), while still being able to optimize, in the “Options”. Under Options–>T1–>New File–>Optimization I selected “No Optimizations”.
What I find happens then, is I can put the credits where I want them, including the Fitness & Arts Credits, and then after all that is done I can jump to the Optimizations form and click on the first box that says “Maximize Refund”. It generally leaves things alone if they didn’t make any difference to the combined tax payable. Failing that, if you have “no optimizations” selected in the options menu as I mentioned above, you can still manually select the items you wish to optimize on that form except you won’t get all those “yellow boxes” that that you see in Rob’s post if you select No Optimizations on that form.
You won’t forget to “optimize” if you have your options manually set to no because Taxcycle automatically gives you an optimization diagnostic in the Review section something like “Taxcycle has been set to not optimize, however, pension splitting remains activated”. You get this whether or not you have anyone with pension splitting. At that point you can either select yes to optimize, or answer no to pension splitting. It likely wasn’t planned this way but I like that Review message which reminds me to that I should try optimizing.
Anyway, turning “optimization” by default off in the T1 options stopped many of the overrides for me, while still allowing me to globally optimize directly from the Optimizations form by manually checking “maximize refund” after I have basically completed the return.
Some of the default optimizations aren’t really optimizations, as they don’t have any effect on the combined balance/due. If I can get both taxpayer’s refunds instead of one owing and one refund, I’ll load up the one spouse who owes with credits in order to bring them to a refund position. Before I did what I described in my first paragraph Taxcycle would sometimes fight me on this, and wanted to allocate to the higher income spouse, even if it made no difference overall.
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