T1 suggestions post-season

Product Suggestions
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  • Export a couple (2Y or 5Y) to Excel
    Have had numerous requests for review of tax rates over the last 5-year period; given the fluctuating and elected deductions/transfers/allocations I’d like to be able to (easily!) export a couple’s incomes, total them (which eliminates the elective choices) and total the tax paid, so as to show them growth or change over time. At present this is relatively manual and somewhat time-consuming. Some quick Excel work would reduce this to minimal effort, with maximal info!

  • Database inquiry
    Ability to query ANY field in the db from Client Manager (eg) to see if it’s engaged (this was prompted by the “uncashed cheques” discussion a bit back)

  • “T” + form number
    This might be a personal gripe; Forever I used to be able to simply type 776…now it goes to some form I never use. Can we make the “unused/lesser-used” forms less important by forcing an additional identifier to them and return to the regualr CRA forms without the “T”? (And why, on earth, on RAC, do we need to enter a T for a trust when they ALL begin with a T…yah…not TaxCycle’s problem there though).

  • DoxCycle scan / PDF import
    I always pull my signed T18s and T1135s into DC…and I need to select the import folder every single time (yes, it’s shown in the Options, but doesn’t seem to work)

  • File Management overall
    On simple files, file management for CRA now takes longer than doing the actual tax return and work. Dunno what to do about that, but maybe smarter people than me can figure that workflow part out?

  • Review Marks
    TC’s review proces is VERY thorough…sometimes to a fault. The CMA, how to file, province of residence and similar questions are almost always just a check-through. Can we make those optional? I have no interest in assisting CRA in getting more people online personally, so I pretty much always ignore that query. CMA should be a carry-forward field and triggered only on a change of T1 address or province of residence IMO. After all, we are supposed to be pros.

  • Charitable Donations
    C/Dons should be as easy to move to the other spouse as Meds are. Not sure why this isn’t done, but the optimizations seem to get in the way occasionally. Maybe take a look at this area as it has come up a number of times (at least for me) this year.

  • T5013s
    Ugh. Talk about useless (CRA’s problem more than TC). They were abysmal this year…CRA got “some” fields (all income fields it appears) and apparently NONE of the loss or expense ones. Go figure. Some, but not all downloaded in AFR. The review mark in this case led me to harrass my clients into finding their actual copies when not provided.

  • T3 slips
    Looks like various providers changed course this year; don’t know if this was them or CRA, but I got a bunch of “consolidated” slips that look like they were done in-house (Odlum Brown, TD Waterhouse and a few others)…but some were actually duplicated info of T3s filed by the actual payor. Luckily I caught this…not sure what TC can do about it, but it was an annoyance frequently as they are often small amounts and not always easy to track back to source slip.

Just a few things now off my mind. Thanks - was a tough season due to things you don’t control (and apparently we don’t either!!). Stupid pols and CRA doing dumb things to cause us extra - and often wasted - work.

2 Likes
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Speaking of the ability to EXPORT the 2Y and 5Y summaries, I would love to see the ability to export the medical expense sheet to Excel. I have clients who miss claiming medical in the previous year, or they don’t have enough medical in the previous year, so the current year is a merging of the two years and we need to find the best 12 month period to claim. Difficult to do when you have a 3 page printout of prescription drugs from the pharmacy. I scan the pharmacy printout, export that to Excel, verify the export matches the printout, then manually enter all the other medical expenses to Excel, then import it all back into TaxCycle. I can’t simply leave the data already entered into TaxCycle because that gets erased by the import.

Still on the Medical Expense form, the sorting option could use some tweaking to be able to sort based on two columns instead of just one column. If I sort by ‘patient’ or by ‘description’, or by ‘payment to’ fields, the date field is not sorted. Even sorting by date field first and then resorting doesn’t correct the problem. If I want it sorted by two columns, I have to enter into Excel and use Data Import to make it work.

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@SmallBizGuy

While I can’t fix or implement any of your suggestions, here’s my $0.02 on some of them.

Re: Database inquiry
Although, it’s a little clunky, you can use the Batch feature in Client Manager to query pretty much any field. See the following link for how-to use Batches…

See also for more specific instructions on querying individual fields…

Keep in mind, while they’re selected, the files included in your batch will be set as read-only if someone else in your office tries to open them - until you clear your batch. Learned that lesson a few years back on April 30th when one of the partners asked me to search all T1 clients that fit a specific criteria and I ended up causing a bit of a panic for the entire office when no one could work on any file.

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Re: “T” + form number
I hear your frustration on this one. This wasn’t an issue until 2021 when new farm commodity codes were introduced. I use the rental schedule WAY more than I would ever use “2021 Canada-Alberta livestock feed assistance initiative (allowable)”. I brought this up in the forum a couple of years ago and the general consensus seemed to be TaxCycle is working as intended - learn to type “T” before the form number.

Re: Charitable Donations
Maybe not as easy as medical, but you can transfer donations easily enough from one spouse to the other by right-clicking the donation line and selecting either “Transfer current donation” or “Transfer all donations”.

With Optimization turned off, you can also use the check boxes at the top of the Donation schedule to choose which spouse should claim them.

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Yes, though it does not always work as intended (ie actually APPLYING them to the transferee!!).

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I fully support the Review marks and Donation suggestions