4d ago

Filing Taxes with Canadian made Software (Deadline is April 30)

Here's a diagram showing all the Canadian tax software options, almost everything is made by a Canadian company except two of the most commonly used.

Please stop using turboTax and H&R Block, you'll likely save quite a bit of money by switching to one of the Canadian owned options too. (H&R Block charges $49.98 for a typical couple, Studio Tax charges $17.50 for up to 10 returns). GenuTax is completely free to use.

Links to each of the Canadian options are available on ShopCanadianStuff.ca

The graphic is originally from ShopCanadianStuff.ca/blog

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Can we remove AdvTax? I wouldn't feel comfortable letting an LLM do my taxes.
Also, their website looks like this:
I don't really care that they're CRA-certified.

The fact that you have to pay a service to pay taxes in the US is insane.
Here in japan if you work full-time or part-time your company files for you and you just fill in 5-10 fields of some sheet and then you're golden. The company is required to help you.
If you file your own taxes you go to the official tax website, follow their web form to input data, and then it generates a PDF. You then either use your mynumber to send the data and pay taxes online, or you go to the tax office (for about 30 minutes) and submit/pay there. It then let's you save your data in a file so you can finish your taxes in 5 minutes every year from then on.
If you don't have internet or a computer, you go to the tax office and go to their support desk that help you file on paper.
- Neither in Canada nor in the US do you need to pay a service to file taxes. All you need to do is get the forms and fill them out. People use these services because the forms are very long with many things to figure out, most of which don’t apply to most people.
  I dunno about the US but in Canada you can download the completed form at the end before submitting it to the tax agency. Using this completed form can show you what you need to fill out yourself next year, assuming your circumstances don’t change.
  
  There are some free ones in Canada, but even the paid ones are cheap I paid $15 for a license, it gives you 20 filings. I did 4 people so less than $5 each and the speed vs paper forms is worth it. However I hear Canada is moving to the system where they may do the taxes for you and you sign it.
- The tax software companies lobby the government to keep the tax system complicated so that people will pay for tax software

Why do all the Canadian options look like they were made by a teenager in 2004
- Tbh I found the same. The one I use has garish colour scheme (which has improved) and initially I thought wtf. But their focus is the bankend, rules,math and logic. In 15 minutes I can have my taxes done and filed online and it only cost me $15 for max 20 filings.
- You don't want to do your taxes with the Comic Sans racecar app "Tax Freeway (for Win)"?
- Oh man, you should try Genutax...unless they've updated since I used it last (I'm a couple years behind), it looks closer to 1994
  
  I used GenuTax for Pc for a few years beginning 2019. I’m not looking for pretty or sleek. It was clear and logical. And it was free! This year i bought Studio Tax (which i used for a few years in the ‘teens when it was free) for under $20 for up to 10 returns. It works great and is Canadian.

How many of these support MRQ filing?

Has anyone ever done their taxes on a phone? Just curious if it sucks? I see a lot of Android/iOS software.
- Works fine on Wealth Simple

What's everyone's favourite? I've been using wealthsimple for the last couple years, honestly surprised to learn its Canadian and I don't need to switch 🤷‍♂️
- I used Studio Tax for a few years and found it to be adequate. Last year I tried GenuTax and instead and I didn't like it as much. Instead of presenting you with the forms and you fulling them (which StudioTax does) GenuTax asks you a million yes/no questions one at a time. If you select "yes", then it shows you appropriate, corresponding form to fill out.
  I guess the good thing about this method is you are presented all the possibilities, the bad thing is you have to yes/no everything, including a million things that probably don't apply to you.
  Also, its not always immediately clear what form a yes/no will lead to, meaning if you select something wrong, you have to back track to correct it. (The questionnaire is linear, you can't just jump back and forth.) if you have a very basic return, that's probably fine. But I had some small self-employed income and international tuition, and going back and forth trying to yes/no my way to the correct forms frustrated me enough to switch back to StudioTax and start again.
  
  I tried an alternate to but had to go back to StudioTax. The other program couldn't deal with me claiming disability amounts for my child. Studio tax picked up a value in a field and says " hey we see you are claiming disability, make sure you have a Txxxx filed with CRA"

Filed completely on my own this year. Wasn't that bad. Idk why I haven't been doing this every year 🤦

I like Studio Tax because I'm a Tax Stud

Be careful with where they store your data, they might be Canadian, but they might be storing your data in the USA and sharing it with USA companies. Read their terms.
I suggest using software that runs on your computer, like GenuTax, sadly it is windows only.
As far as I am aware, only a single online offer used to encrypt your data, but they removed it when they were bought by WealthSimple, so they could sell your data to third parties.

CloudTax is great, very impressed and it was like $20 if I recall

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