This is my first year with TaxCycle, and although we’ve been able to adequately customize the print jobs, there are still certain pages that we can’t figure out how to prevent from printing. Is there an “advanced” print set customization available? For example, two pages of the donations worksheet print, whereas we only want page 1 to print unless there are carry-forwards. Also, I find the Schedule 2 Worksheet unnecessary in most instances, especially when we’re preparing the returns for both spouses. Again, that ends up being three extra pages for each client.
I know I can shut the donation worksheet off altogether, but can’t stop page two from printing. I can’t see anywhere to stop printing the schedule 2 worksheet at all.
Most of my clients make donations (and deduct the full amount annually) and are married. Therefore, these “extra” pages end up being nearly a thousand extra pages to be shredded (or unnecessarily stored).
I have found the same wasted paper with the donations but I don’t keep paper copies for my files; I print to PDF. What I would suggest for next year is a schedule much like the Dependent Expenses schedule that can list donations so that schedule can be included in the customized print jobs rather than the voluminous schedule that now prints.
I never noticed that “Dependent Expenses” schedule. I concur that would be a great replacement in most cases where we’re just looking for a list of the donations.
With respect to PDF archives, I guess I’m still a bit old fashioned. I don’t trust digital files exclusively and ensure that I have enough paper in each file that I could recreate the return if absolutely necessary. I consider the TaxCycle files to be the digital archive. I have full confidence that TaxCycle will be around for years into the future, so that I should always be able to open the files. Maybe some day I’ll go completely digital, and PDF is the way to go (although I’m not a fan of the new Acrobat Reader DC … what in the world has Adobe done there???)
And actually I’d like this type of schedule to include political contributions as well on the same page. I find it clumsy to find the political contributions on the Credits page. You have to scroll down through a bunch of miscellaneous credits to find where the political donations are entered. A page that lists charitable donations and political contributions would allow those items to be checked off easily, much like the Slips page.
Sorry to go a bit off topic: @kevin, are you using DoxCycle? With the political contributions correctly classified you can just click in the link from DoxCycle and it takes you right to the spot where both provincial and federal political contributions are entered. This works for most things in DoxCycle, even for items you create yourself if you tell it what form you want. I found it very slick and did not have to spend a lot of time scrolling around. A few items don’t link as well, but I am hoping those will be updated for next season (as well as maybe the ability to specify a cell in TaxCycle when we create our own items in DoxCycle).
I use DoxCycle to organize my larger T1 files and have found the custom categorization feature a real asset this year. I like the bookmarked PDF file that results. However, I don’t use it for linking slips to the T1. I find that since DoxCycle doesn’t seem to recognize the info on all slips, it leads to spending more time preparing the return than it’s worth. In other words, if I have to create a box and enter a number in the box, why don’t I just enter it on the tax return? I decided that linking some slips and entering other had a greater chance of errors than just entering all the slips by hand. I will look at it again next year to see if the scanning recognition gets better. I do use the download from CRA and find it’s great for the slips you can access. As I said, having said this, I do like DoxCycle and think it has greater potential.