What's Right for You?

You are engaged to prepare all of the returns within your office for a group of small associated CCPC’s with the same year end. Due to the size of the corporations, no single corporation can fully utilize the small business deduction.

This scenario would likely benefit from using all of the features of the T2 Data Connection. By linking the files, you can transfer the R&A information instead of having to enter it manually. You can then use the Allocation Scenarios to help determine the optimal SBD allocation as well as other allocations, such as certain provincial allocations. The R&A information, links and allocations can then be imported from one return to another using the import command.

Consult the section “Suggested methodology” of the Help for step-by-step instructions on using all the features in the most optimal fashion.

You are engaged to prepare the corporate returns for a corporate group that consists of a large parent company and several smaller associated corporations. Some of the corporations have different year ends. There are also several related corporations in the group for whom you do not prepare the returns.

Your approach to preparing these returns may depend on a number of factors such as: how close together the year ends are, what adjustments to the data may be needed due to having different year ends, etc. You also may use different T2 Data Connection features depending on whether or not you are preparing the first return in the calendar year, the last return in the calendar year or one in between.

For example, if you are preparing the first return in the calendar year, you may want to roll forward the other returns in the group to the current calendar year and then link to these returns in order to automatically update all of the prior year information (e.g. taxable capital from the preceding tax year) from the other returns to the R&A workchart bearing in mind that you may need to adjust certain amounts to take into account the fact that there are different year ends.

While you will need to enter any applicable allocations in this return, in this situation, the Allocation Scenarios may not be relevant because the allocations may be straightforward (e.g. 100% to the parent corporation) and/or the information in the later returns may not be sufficiently complete to provide meaningful results.

In this case, you might utilize the suggested methodology to use the T2 Data Connection.

You are engaged to prepare the corporate returns for several members of a corporate group in which the corporations are related but not associated. In addition, the list of related corporations changes from year to year.

As these are not associated corporations, the amount of data required to be completed in the R&A workchart is not extensive. You may therefore find that it is just as fast to manually update the list of related corporations in the first return rather than acquiring the information by linking the returns – especially if you are not preparing all of the returns for the related group.

However, you can save time when preparing the second and subsequent returns by using the import command to import the revised list of related corporations into the other returns. The wizard will allow you to easily match up the revised list of related corporations with the list of related corporations rolled forward from the prior year.