Article content

The latest stats from Canada Revenue Agency’s tax filing season tracker show that as of April 12, 16.1 million taxpayers have filed, meaning about half of us have yet to file our 2025 tax return — including me. But I’m not panicking, as I always wait until the last minute to make sure I haven’t missed anything. And, since I always try to avoid getting a tax refund, I’m not racing to file early.

Article content

Article content

With the general filing due date of April 30 less than two weeks away, I thought I’d share my three-step process for preparing my personal tax return, to ensure that when I do file, my return is accurate and complete.

Article content

Article content

Article content

Step 1: Prepare an initial draft

Article content

I prepared a first draft of my tax return in early March, using TurboTax, one of the many certified software packages available online. You can see a full list of authorized products for this season online at the CRA site. The costs of the various packages vary, but if you have a modest income, many are free.

Article content

Because I’ve been using the same software for more than a decade, TurboTax will simply transfer my personal information along with any carryforward information, such as RRSP room and capital loss carryforwards, from my 2024 return to my 2025 return electronically, saving me from starting from scratch each year.

Article content

I then went online to CRA My Account to download any available slips using CRA’s Autofill program, which is hit and miss, since not all the slips are available electronically, and some hadn’t yet been uploaded to the system in early March. But, at least it saved me from manually entering them and potentially making a transposition error (which happened to me once) when entering my various T-slips.

Article content

Article content

My next step was to compare the T-slips I got last year (for 2024), with the T-slips for 2025 that were automatically downloaded. I wasn’t surprised to see that a bunch of them were still outstanding, especially for various mutual fund trusts and exchange-traded funds, which typically issue their T3 slips in mid-March. I made a note of the missing slips, and would return to this in early April. It’s important to flag any missing slips, otherwise you could be on the hook for the “repeated failure to report income” penalties.

Article content

Article content

As a reminder, under the Income Tax Act, if you fail to report at least $500 of income in a tax year and in any of the three preceding taxation years, the penalty will be the lesser of 10 per cent of the unreported income and 50 per cent of the difference between the understatement of tax (or the overstatement of tax credits) related to the omission and the amount of any tax paid in respect of the unreported amount, for example, by an employer through source deductions withheld. A corresponding provincial 10-per-cent penalty is also often assessed.

Article content

Step 2: Gather receipts

Article content

I then moved to gathering my various receipts, which I had been saving all year in two places: a physical 2025 tax file for paper receipts, and an electronic folder on my OneDrive for any receipt that comes in electronically by e-mail or that I downloaded throughout the year. My receipts typically fall into one of three categories: charitable donations, medical expenses and workspace-in-the-home expenses.