Corporate Group info automation

This could be accomplished in the same fashion as T4’s and T5’s are brought into the T1…

Not sure it would work that well since it needs to be updated in real time

@BertMulderCGA @james1 -

Interesting thought, although we were imagining that you would have 2 or more corporate returns open as you play with the numbers, having all the returns update in real time.

Using the same technology we use in slip sync would be an easy to implement solution, but I’m concerned this would not solve the problem for everyone.

I’d be interested to hear from the community… how would you want to work with associated corporations?

~ Cameron

@Cameron, what you envision would work well, in cases where you are actually preparing the related companies at the same time…

This is sometimes true, but most often it is not…

@James1, what I envision is that, as you complete (print) the one return, the relevant data to be used by others in the group is kept in a ‘hold file’, just like now the T4 and T5 info is held, referenced by business number.

When working with associated corporations, do you consider all the corporations to be “peers”, or is there usually one corporation that is the notional “head of the corporate family”?

It would be convenient if we could designate one CGI form as the master schedule, which would then feed the CGI forms on all the other associated corporations.

Or is there more of a web effect… A is related to B which is related to C, but C is not necessarily related to A?

~ Cameron

For us there is more of a web effect.

As @BurtMulderCGA suggests, I like the idea of both. Sometimes both files are open at the same time, in other cases we have different people working on the files. There can be changes made in individual files, so we would need a notification like the SlipSync provides to indicate a file has changed and be able to push a button to get the update.

In a perfect world, pressing that button would update all of the files with a nice summary of the impact.

That does not work when you are dealing with allocating the small business deduction. When I do my large corporate groups, I need to have a real time update.

The only time your solution would be helpful would be when one company has an off year end for the others; however, even in that situation, I would rather it be real time update than using a slipsync solution.

The files need to be linked. I am not sure there would be any reason to have the stop gap of asking if you want to update; however, it would be nice to know if there are changes after filing.

When I do my corporate groups, I do not want to be accepting changes in seven or more files several times a day.

That could work; however, you need to pull information for each of the files regardless if you have a master form. For instance, you need to link in the taxable capital calculations from each file. The dividends paid and received should pull as well

It would also be nice to see a corporate summary taxable income etc being pulled from each of the companies so I can see in real time the affect of the changes on the corporate group

The biggest issue I see is when I am in company b and company a is the master, I would prefer to adjust the S23 in the file I am working on and have it update the group.

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However it ends up, one of the key things for us would be to get a notification if there has been a change – but only if there has been an actual change. I the software we used to use, we would get a notification in one file, sync the other files and save them, and then get a message in the first file that the others had changed (because of the sync, presumably). So we would only want to know of a change if the CGI information on a file was different than the other associated files.

We would also really like it if the link to the files updates when the files are rolled over from one year to the next. I presume something like that may require some kind of master file or synchronization for file rollovers.

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Maybe the answer is to ‘Couple’ the files or make it a family like a T1.

That would make common summaries etc. easier. We would want to be able to have different people updating the files at the same time, though, so that could be an issue.

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