CRA T2 Auto-fill Service

The Canada Revenue Agency's (CRA) T2 Auto-fill secure service, available with T2 certified software products, lets business owners and authorized representatives download information from the CRA to their tax preparation software.

Using this web service, you can save time and ensure accuracy by downloading a number of items directly from the CRA straight into DT Max. Once downloaded, you can then take advantage of DT Max's powerful Right-hand side display feature to view the downloaded data. Next, you can choose whether to update either some or all of your existing data with the downloaded data using DT Max's Copy to left-hand side feature.

Supported tax data delivery items

The following tax items can be downloaded from the CRA into DT Max:

• T2 Return

  • Assessment or reassessment data

• T2 return balances

  • Refundable dividend tax on hand (RDTOH) - at the end of the previous tax year (for tax year starting in 2018 and prior tax years).

  • Eligible refundable dividend tax on hand (ERDTOH) - at the end of the previous tax year (for tax year starting in 2019 and later tax years).

  • Non-eligible refundable dividend tax on hand (NERDTOH) - at the end of the previous tax year (for tax year starting in 2019 and later tax years).

  • General rate income pool balances (GRIP) - at the end of the previous tax year.

  • Non-capital losses - balance as of current date.

  • Capital losses - balance as of current date (data will be available for this balance in May 2020).

  • Capital gains and losses - amounts as of current date.

  • Capital dividend account - balance as of processed date.

• Corporation account balances

  • Non-filing periods - amounts on the account that are not associated with a period-end will appear in Non-filing periods.

  • Filing periods - the information is summarized by filing period based on accounting transactions that occurred on the account in the previous five calendar years.

  • Prior periods - accounting information older than five calendar years will be totalled and summarized in prior periods.

• Business number address, email, return mail indicator

  All addresses, including a return mail indicator (if applicable) will be provided.

  • Physical Location address

  • Mailing address

  • Books & Records address

  • Email addresses

What you will need to use this service

Please ensure that the following conditions are met prior to using this service:

• Business owner: To use this secure service you must be signed up and registered with CRA's My Business Account.

• Authorized representatives for a business owner: If you prepare a tax return for a corporation, you need to take the following steps:

  • Become authorized to use T2 Auto-fill for the corporation. To get this authorization, first get a RepID through the Represent a Client portal. The RepID identifies you with the CRA.

  • Give your RepID to your client so they can authorize you as their representative through My Business Account or by filling out and sending Form RC59, Business Consent, to get online access.

• Authorized representatives: You must have a CRA or Sign-In partner credential and a valid RC59, with level 1 (or higher) authorization for online access on file with the CRA for your client. For more information, see the CRA's About Represent a Client web page (in particular, see items 5 and 6).

• The time must be set correctly on your computer. The CRA has a time limit for completing the transaction. A discrepancy of more than five minutes between the time on your computer and the correct time is enough for the CRA to invalidate the transaction.

• The time zone must be set correctly on your computer. This is because UTC time is used for the transaction.

• You must close all instances of Internet Explorer that you have running before attempting to download.

What you need to know

• You may download your client's tax information as many times as needed, until the moment you are ready to file his or her tax return.

• Once downloaded, the CRA data will remain available regardless of whether or not you use it to update your existing tax data. For example, if you change the right-hand side display to another option from the drop-down menu, and then return to the "CRA T2 Auto-fill" option, you will have the choice of either displaying the previously retrieved data, or updating from the CRA again.

• As per the CRA Terms and Conditions of Use, you are required to ensure that all applicable fields contained on the return that you will file with the CRA are completed, and that the information provided is true and accurate.

For information on the procedure to download tax data from the CRA, consult the document Procedure to download T2 tax data from CRA.

Recommendations

We strongly recommend that you disable the sorting feature in your DT Max preferences. To do so, please select User Defaults from your Preferences menu. Under the Miscellaneous tab, untick the box for Enable sorting. This will allow you to maintain the correspondence between the copied data (that is on the left-hand side of the screen) and the downloaded data (that is on the right-hand side of the screen). Otherwise, DT Max might automatically reorganize the order of the data by enabling the sorting feature.