This has been mentioned before, but I have found it more troublesome this year. We need to have a way to keep multiple paragraphs together. Our standard formatting is full justification. As a result of the way the paragraphs print, that means that a topic heading is a separate paragraph from the body of that topic. Not having the ability to keep those two paragraphs together means that we often have the heading on one page and the body on the next. We fix this by manually editing the letter. And that is where the bigger problem arises. If the letter has been manually edited and there is a chance to the tax return, the letter does not update with the new payable or refundable amount. You have to revert to standard and re-edit. IF you remember. This leaves a lot of chance for the numbers in the letter to be wrong. So for us, this is a critical issue.
This would be a “nice to have” item. Since the CDE (SEND) form has the information, it would be nice to have a section in the standard letter to highlight if there is an existing balance owing to CRA, or other debt on file that could reduce the refund or increase the amount owing. We don’t have a lot of these instances, but this would save the time later on when the client doesn’t get what they are expecting based on the letter. It will be easy enough for me to add a snippet that we can add to the standard template, but I though if others would find it useful it might be added to the standard letter.
This is also a “nice to have” item. I am not sure if snippets are new this year, or just new to me this year, but I was thinking that it might be nice to either have the standard letter be made up of snippets or have a second standard letter made up of snippets. There are sections of the letter that we customize, and also sections that we never use because they don’t apply to our province. With everything in the letter, it can be a bit hard to edit and isolate certain things. My thought is that using snippets might make the editing and customization of the overall letter, as well as individual sections less cumbersome.
I hear your frustration with the “keep with next” I hope the next version of the component we use supports that, but if not, I’ve logged a bug in the hope we can do something about it. One of the tricks I use in the built-in letters is to do a title and then a line break (shift+enter) after, to keep it as the same paragraph, then use the keep lines together option in the paragraph properties. Doesn’t work like Word, but it helps a bit.There are some tips a the bottom of this page: https://www.taxcycle.com/Documentation/Templates/Formatting/Page-breaks
I will personally look into the second item when I review all the possible changes to the T1 templates over the summer.
We’ve been throwing around this idea to for the long term. (It isn’t likely a this-year thing.) We certainly would have to come up with a new way to list snippets in the sidebar because the templates lists are getting very long.
The problem with the Shift+Enter solution (which I tried last year), is that when using full justification it spreads the title out across the entire line. That solution works well if the don’t use full justification but since everything else we present is in full justification mode it would make our client letter look odd.
I wasn’t expecting any changes right away, these were just the items I came up with over the season and had a few minutes to put them into writing this morning.
Hi @matthew
I’m working on the second idea you had above. Hoping to add the following mention to the client letters in the next release. Would this do the trick?
{{# RepAClientCDE.ClientInformation.DebtOwedToCRA}}
CRA records indicate that you have debt owing to one or more government departments, programs or agencies. {{# T1.RefundBalanceOwing.Refund }}Some or all of your tax refund may be used to reduce this debt. {{/ T1.RefundBalanceOwing.Refund }}{{# T1.RefundBalanceOwing.BalanceOwing }}This amount is in addition to the amount of federal tax owing stated aboved.{{/ T1.RefundBalanceOwing.BalanceOwing }}
{{/ RepAClientCDE.ClientInformation.DebtOwedToCRA}}