Thanks for using this tax return. It is complete and approved for direct submission to Revenue Canada after you enter your data. If you bought a disk, the Rev Canada authorization number is included. (Also on the disk is a compressed shareware version which we invite you to circulate as widely as you wish.)
If you got this as shareware from a BBS or user group, please contact Icicle Computer by mail, internet or phone with your payment of $25 ($15 for a renewal) by cheque (preferably!) or Visa, and we’ll be pleased to give you the authorization number.
This 1993 Canada/provincial Tax Return uses about a dozen linked Microsoft® Excel™ 3.0 worksheets, set up to resemble closely the original set of basic personal forms from Revenue Canada - Taxation. Each Schedule exists as a separate linked worksheet. The worksheets take care of the arithmetic, but you need to enter the data. The usual Tax Guide and forms from Revenue Canada will help to complete the process.
••• To do this return •••
1) Copy the folder, ‘Newfoundland (or other province) ƒ,’ to any convenient place on your disk. Folders can be freely renamed, but please don’t change file names.
2) Open the file ‘1993 Tax.’ This process takes a minute or three.
3) Enter data in ‘A Tax Worksheet’ first, as it provides basic information to all other worksheets. Pressing the «Tab» or «Enter» key will take you in order through all the data cells in each worksheet. («Shift»«Tab» backs up.) Use standard Excel practices.
4) Save your work as you proceed.
5) Enter data to T1 General and all other relevant Schedules or Forms.
6) When you have entered ALL your data, print your Return. Don’t forget to print T1-KS; see the note below on direct submission.
7) The ‘Tax’ menu helps with printing and viewing the worksheets.
Any item of data needs to be entered only once. Step through each schedule which applies to you and you will find a space for all items. Don’t force data into locked cells unless you are certain you wish to make a special change. For instance, as you work through the T1 General you will skip over cells which calculate amounts from all the other schedules. Be patient; you’ll get to the schedules and the entries will calculate.
If you are doing returns for various members of your family, save a distinct folder for each by duplicating the original and giving each duplicate folder an appropriate name.
••• While doing your taxes…
• SPOUSE’S INCOME. This year, a “spouse” may be legally married or common-law. Please be sure to enter your spouse’s net income on ‘A Tax Worksheet.’ The number is used in a lot of calculations. A more or less accurate estimate will yield an equally accurate (or inaccurate) calculation of your tax liability. If your spouse’s net income is relatively low (up to about $7-10,000, maybe more depending on deductions), remember that you may benefit from deductions for TUITION, DISABILITY, AGE or PENSION amounts transferred; t he templates compute a sketchy reckoning of Schedule 2—Amounts Transferred from Spouse which may be worth a look!
(Incidentally, spousal income is the only important number which could usefully be ‘linked’ to your spouse’s forms. If you wish to establish a link, use publish and subscribe techniques.)
• EQUIVALENT-to-SPOUSE. In some circumstances (in the year of a change in marital status) the forms compute whether the spousal deduction or the equivalent-to-spouse deduction is more directly advantageous to you. Check to ensure that you don’t lose a dependant claim altogether!
• MINIMUM TAX may, perhaps, apply to you if your Taxable Income combined with a number of esoteric items total more than $40,000. “Minimum Tax” flags (text notices) will appear on page 4 of T1 General and on the Ontario T1C forms. The deductions discussed at Line 400 in the Guide appear to be the real trigger. Just plain salary doesn’t seem to set off this trap. You can reassure yourself with an electronic Form T691 which integrates with this workspace and is available for $10 by order from Icicle, or you can grope with the paper form from RevCanada.
ALTERNATIVELY, if the “Minimum Tax” FLAGS appear, they can be REMOVED and Minimum Tax ignored by selecting the ‘Macro Run’ command, ‘'Tax Macros'!Clear_Min_Flag.’
• PROVINCIAL TAX—the T1C(Prov) form—is rather complex in B. C., Saskatchewan and Ontario. Manitoba transcends the merely complex to become a tax dream—or nightmare! We have set T1C to compute logically, we think. If you have a spouse, please be careful to ensure that you have claimed everything to which you are collectively entitled. For instance, Ontario demands that the spouse with the higher net income has to claim dependent children or disabled dependants, which makes tax sense most of the time. (We still aren’t entirely sure what Manitoba wants—but the form computes many options!) If our computation doesn’t reflect your reality (or your perception of the Manitoba variation of reality), you’ll need to ‘Unprotect’ the document and make changes manually, according to your own judgment.
• Ontario has seen fit to introduce a separate form to calculate Property and Sales Tax Credit for Seniors. In these templates, that form calculates automatically and prints as a fourth page in the T1C(Prov) file. Data entries should be made to the general Ontario Tax Credits form which is the first page of that file.
• Capital gains also demand care to complete confusing forms (T657, 936, and 2017). Use the Rev Canada Guides! The RRSP deduction-allowable calculation (A Tax Worksheet) is another place for caution.
• If you need to complete supplementary reports, such as business or rental income statements, you can do those reports separately and enter the final figures as data. Or, you can set up any statement as an Excel worksheet and link it to the appropriate cells in these templates (or subscribe to a published edition of another application).
••• We will be pleased to answer questions about the workings of these templates, phone (613)237-4899 or by Internet, an655@freenet.carleton.ca. On tax law and loopholes we are NOT experts, so please refer the subtleties of your own situation to your own accountant/bookkeeper/significant other!•••
••• These are Excel™ files…
…all of the worksheets are standard Excel 3 files. (Deliberately a bit behind the times, they also work with later versions of Excel. Anyone still using version 2.2 or earlier really should consider an upgrade.)
…all worksheets have been ‘protected’ with data entry cells left unlocked to allow direct moves from cell to cell using «tab» or «enter». Any sheet can be ‘unprotected’ any time by selecting the appropriate command in the ‘Options’ menu. There is no password. Toggle back to ‘protected’ and the automatic moves reappear.
…the formulæ are set to deal with most common situations. If those don’t include you, then with care they can be changed, deleted, or data entered directly after ‘unprotecting’ a worksheet, using standard Excel practices.
…if a list of items is too short for you, carefully ‘insert’ additional rows. Usually, this will be easier if you ‘Display’ column and row headings (under the ‘Options’ menu) and select whole rows by clicking on the numbers along the left margin. If possible, insert in the middle of a list rather than at the top or bottom, in order to ensure that defined ranges remain intact. After inserting, ‘Fill Down’ the row above the insertion to copy formulæ into the new rows.
…‘1993 Tax’ is a ‘workspace’ (refined into a ‘workbook’ in Excel 4: refer to your Excel manual) which arranges about a dozen linked worksheets in the folder. It should be at the top of the list in an Excel ‘open’ dialogue box. Opening takes a couple of minutes, or more on slower Macs. If your ‘1993 Tax’ file is accidentally overwritten, you can restore the original workspace. Go to the Finder and drag to your working folder a copy («Option»-«Drag» copies a file on the same disk) of ‘1993 Tax’ from the folder where you have kept the original, untouched (of course!) files. By copying in the Finder, Excel doesn’t notice the change and opens your work routinely.
…‘A Tax Worksheet’ is right on top after you open the ‘1993 Tax’ workspace. Do it first. Do the T1 General, then various Schedules and supporting Forms in any order. Be aware that many entries, especially on the T1 General, depend on data input to another form. You can limit the number of worksheets whose windows are in view through the ‘Tax’ menu, described below.
…select the worksheet on which you wish to work under the ‘Window’ menu (or by clicking on it or by the keyboard commands, «Command»-M/ «Command»-«Shift»-M).
…the workspace setup deliberately omits the ‘tool bar’ and the ‘formula bar.’ Use the ‘Options Workspace’ menu command to return the tool and formula bars to the window, if you wish.
…all the worksheets should be open simultaneously. Macros which make the ‘Tax’ menu work expect it. (Incidentally, if your Mac is running System 6.0.x and a flock of INITs, you may encounter errors related to the Mac’s default number of open files, which is 40; this number can be easily increased by using a utility such as Bootman, available on many BBSs.)
…dates should be entered in Excel conventions, eg, “d mmm yy” or “m/d/yy.” The typical proper display is “31 Jan 93.” A date incorrectly entered is the probable source of a burst of #VALUE errors.
…number formats used throughout are variations on Excel standards. Numbers should be entered in a form consistent with the System in your machine, typically “50000.2” or “50,000.20” or “12345” with a US System—the North American English norm.
…there are 300+ re-calculations for some entries. Speed up data entry (but lose some useful bells and whistles) by opting for manual calculation.
…these templates were designed using the Helvetica font. If you don’t have Helvetica in your System, your Mac will use Geneva, a wider typeface which will cause the templates to expand and, on a classic Mac, will result in disorienting screen movement. Sure, Geneva is easier to read on screen, but Helvetica saves space on the printed forms. Please use Helvetica.
•• The ‘Tax’ menu—
The ‘Tax’ menu speeds printing, it allows you to have on-screen only those forms you want, it offers two short cuts to close all the files, and a final command allows you to remove the ‘Tax’ menu itself.
Setup Printing…
allows you to check settings prior to printing. The default is as shown, to print without a preview or a check of the page setup (which works (for us, anyway) on LaserWriters, StyleWriters, HP DeskWriters or ImageWriters, at least). If your pages are just too large, try reducing the print size by a few per cent (try 95-98%) in the print dialogue.
The “Print” command allows you to print a selected bunch of forms. The “Hide/Show” command selects which worksheets to show. Those which are hidden remain; they’re just out of sight. The two commands use similar dialogues, like this:
In this case, Schedules 2, 4 and 8 &9 will be hidden.
Obviously, the print dialogue invites you to select forms to print. In the print dialogue variation of the illustration above, all of the selected forms would be printed while Schedules 2, 4 and 8 &9 would be ignored. By default, ALL forms are selected. Changes become defaults when the ‘Tax Macros’ file is saved. The ‘Close & Save All’ command does save the ‘Tax Macros’ file.
‘Show All Forms’ does that, un-hiding forms previously hidden.
‘Close All, No Save’ closes all of the dozen or so files WITHOUT saving. You need to confirm your decision in a dialogue box.
‘Close & Save All’ closes all, but saves everything, after confirmation.
‘Remove Menu’ applies only to this ‘Tax’ menu. Use it and all of these custom commands are gone. (The ‘Macro Run’ command, ‘Set Tax Menu,’ remains available to re-install it.)
••• Direct Submission •••
Direct submission of these worksheets to Revenue Canada - Taxation printed on a StyleWriter or better has been approved. In past years, an ImageWriter version was also approved, but this year we didn't have one to use; we suppose that such a printout will be acceptable this year, too. The worksheets can be modified to accommodate your particular set-up, as can any Excel worksheet. Beware that extensive changes may invalidate Revenue Canada’s approval of this format for direct submission. “Extensive changes” would affect the page format, page breaks, use much different type faces, or lack an approval number.
To submit your return directly, print the T1 Return and the supporting Schedules you need to submit on 8 1/2" x 11" 16 lb. bond paper. You can print double-sided returns on 20 lb. paper. Rev Canada will accept all of the forms printed on white paper. Continuous fan-fold paper is okay, as long as you separate the sheets and remove the perforations. Don’t forget to print Form ‘T1-KS.’ It’s included with this package, and automatically includes figures from the Schedules. (Note that if you have had to complete some of the more esoteric forms, such as T2222 or T2038(IND), you will need to enter the data manually in the appropriate spaces on T1-KS.)
Rev Canada may reject computer-printed returns for processing:
- if the paper quality does not meet its basic weight standards (16# or 20#);
- if print quality is illegible;
- if the return is not in the correct format, or,
- if the return does not show an APPROVAL NUMBER.
If you bought this package from Icicle directly, the approval number is already included at the bottom of the T1 General return. If you downloaded the shareware package from a BBS or the like, you can get the approval from Icicle upon payment of the shareware fee, $25 (or $15 renewal). We accept Visa by phone, (613)237-4899, or via Internet, an655@freenet.carleton.ca, quoting your name and address, account number and expiry date.
••• Disclaimer •••
This template is distributed with the understanding that, while every reasonable care has been taken to ensure its accuracy, the author cannot be held responsible for any omissions or errors. Because tax returns are personal and relate to individual circumstances, the author cannot be liable for losses or risks with respect to the use of this general template. This template should not be used as a substitute for professional advice, and any questions should be directed to a professional adviser.
In the unlikely event that you discover an error, please let us know so that we can inform others. We would also welcome any suggestions you may have to improve next year’s forms. Thanks!
