Taxcycle nicely provides the user with diagnostic messages suggesting loss carrybacks if there are non capital losses or net capital losses on the T2 Schedule 4.
Not trying to replace the accountant entirely from the engagement … but Taxcycle could also warn the user on line 135 of Schedule 4 if the corporation has current (or prior) year non-capital losses, but is also subject to Part 4 tax on dividend income. Taxcycle could pick up the amount from line M on Schedule 3 and use a positive number in that box to trigger the diagnostic suggestion on line 135 of Schedule 4.
Of course… if Optimizations are set to minimize taxable income… Taxcycle could even go one step farther and actually assume the corporation would not want to pay the Part IV tax if it was in receipt of dividend income but also had a current year (or previous year) loss, and automatically populate line 135 of Schedule 4 with the optimized amount.
Case in point;
I had a corporation that received about $2,500 in dividend income from passive investments, but had a loss for the year of about $5,000. A fully optimized Taxcycle would have my client pay about $950 in corporate tax while carrying forward a non-capital loss to 2017.
I’m not complaining here… things are working great (and Profile would have never caught this either), just throwing out any suggestions I feel might help make the software bulletproof.