Preparing Business Taxes
Mikebrcic
Member Posts: 3
I need to submit my business return to CRA and because my first year was very simple (zero revenue, very few expenses), I don't want to use my accountant for this (I have another business that is much more complicated and he and my bookkeeper use Quickbooks to manage bookkeeping and accounting for that).
From what I can tell, Wave doesn't have any useful exporting features to export our financials in a format that can be used/imported by CRA or other business tax return software?
I can file a short T2 return, but CRA asks for income statement and balance sheet Schedule forms, which means I would have to manually input all that information into a form (again, there aren't many transactions/items, but enough that it would be a pain in the arse to input all of this manually).
Any suggestions?
Comments
@Mikebrcic Wave does not integrate with the CRA or business tax return software, sorry. You will notice that Wave has a suite of reports including an income statement report and balance sheet where you can get the information for the return though. And there are a lot of accountants that are active in the forum that could use the information from Wave (we have full collaborator access) to get you out to a T2 return in a cost efficient manner I'm sure.
Thanks Kirk. Any plans to add tax-friendly export options (e.g. GIFI files)?
@Mikebrcic No plans as of right now -- will be sticking with PDF and CSV files for the time being.
Hmm, that's a big minus for using Wave as my business accounting - I will probably switch over to another platform, which is a bummer because I enjoy Wave for everything else.
I too would like to see ability to produce a report with tax line codes (GIFI) it would make it much quicker and easier to complete the T@ return. The end game of accounting for me is completing the CRA T2 tax. I would imagine this is the same for most wave users.
You might want to consider adding a 4 digit numeric field to the Trial balance report where we could enter the GIFI code and carry it over for each year. From there we could create our own GIFI CSV file. I know that there is a lot more to GIFI but other than the first row, the most significant portion of the work is allocating GIFI codes and if we only have to do it once, we could probably live with it.
Feature to export reports in GIFI format will absolutely be very helpful for users of wave. I believe most customers of Wave are small businesses who want to do the book keeping by their selves to save accounting cost. Most of these users also want to do their T2 Return by their own. So GIFI codes are absolutely necessary.
Until Wave puts this feature in their backlog, here is something what I am doing to make my life easier at the time of reporting.
I have renamed all my income, expense, asset accounts and attached GIFI code for each of them at the front.
e.g. Here are how some of my account names look like
Income
- 8000 - Sales
- 8230 - Credit Card Cash Back
Cost of Goods Sold
- 8457 - Shipping & Duty
Operating Expenses
- 8715 - Bank Service Charges
- 8811 - Office Supply
Reports look much more easier when I can see these codes there.
Here are links to all GIFI codes which I used to rename all my accounts.
http://saundersandassociates.ca/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/GIFI-Code-Chart-of-Accounts.pdf
https://www.canada.ca/en/revenue-agency/services/forms-publications/publications/rc4088/general-index-financial-information-gifi.html#appendix_A
Hope it helps
Hey @Jigar,
This is an awesome work around! Thank you so much for posting so that others can do the same. As for exporting in GIFI format, this is still something that isn't on the horizon at the moment, but I really like your idea of adding the GIFI codes to the accounts/categories on your Accounting > Chart of Accounts page.
If anybody is wondering, this is what it would look like in your Chart of Accounts. I realize this isn't an ideal workaround but it would at least allow you to quickly reference the GIFI codes for your accounts/categories on a given report when filling out tax forms.
Wait. What?
No GIFI export? Seriously? How can you call this "accounting software"? After all the work I put in to set up my accounts this is really disappointing.
Welcome to Free accounting platform Wave. They are focused on payment platform right now ( revenue generator) . all other (free) features can wait
Who says it should be free? I would be happy to pay extra for advanced features.
Hey @Giraffe @fakenoob
We totally hear you with this and understand how some kind of integration with tax software or an export might help you during tax time. Thanks for your feedback in our community, our team is listening.
Hello,
Another question on how to export Wave data in a T2 tax friendly format. I have gone through and relabeled the accounts and categories per the GIFI list, and that gives me GIFI-friendly reports. I have also created an HST/2 recoverable tax to reflect the 50% ITC on meals, and a HST/2 non recoverable version, and I apply those to meals (excluding tip --> accounting for meals with 50% ITC and tip is a lot steps, which is too bad since there are so many meal expenses in my business).
BUT, the question I have here is that T2 GIFI form or tax software looks for the NET expense value per GIFI category, so the ITC is to be deducted. Can a report give me the data for this? I need the total ITC per expense category to deduct from the total expense. For expense categories that aren't Meal and Entertainment, this is the Pretax amount. For Meals and Entertainment, this is the pretax amount plus half the original tax.
I am not seeing any method to extract this data, so either I'm doing something wrong (either in my understanding or implementation), or this is a big miss on Wave's part. How is everyone else managing this?