What Auto-fill My Return does not fill
Auto-fill My Return gives you what the CRA already holds, which is slips. It has nothing for the paperwork a client hands over in a bag: out-of-pocket medical receipts, paper donation slips, rental records, self-employment logs, childcare, moving costs, union dues, support payments and carrying charges. That is the part still being typed.
What it does carry
Auto-fill My Return fills parts of a return from what the CRA already holds in My Account. That is possible because third parties — employers, banks, issuers — file that information with the CRA in the first place. Run it as an authorised representative and the slips come down for you to review.
It is very good at this, and the practical consequence is that the slip half of a return has largely stopped being data entry. The authoritative list of what the service carries is the CRA’s own: Auto-fill My Return for professional tax preparers.
What it cannot carry, and why
The rule is simple enough to apply yourself: if nobody files it with the CRA, Auto-fill cannot bring it down. No one files a pharmacy printout. No one files the shoebox.
So this is the part that is still typed, every year, by a person:
- Out-of-pocket medical receipts — pharmacy printouts, dental invoices, physiotherapy, glasses, travel for treatment. Usually the largest single pile.
- Paper donation receipts from charities that issue on paper.
- Rental records for a T776 — rent received, property tax notices, insurance, repairs, mortgage interest statements, condo fees.
- Self-employment records for a T2125 — invoices out, expenses in, mileage logs, the business-use-of-home arithmetic.
- Child care receipts, which arrive as anything from a daycare statement to a handwritten note.
- Moving expenses for a T1-M.
- Union and professional dues not already shown on a slip.
- Support payments made, with the agreement details behind them.
- Carrying charges and investment fees that arrive on a statement rather than a slip.
- Student loan interest where the statement is the only record.
None of that is exotic. It is the ordinary contents of an envelope from a client with a family, a rental property or a side business — which is to say, the returns that take the longest.
Two limits worth knowing before the season
Timing. The service can only use what the CRA has at the time of the request. The CRA says it should receive most third-party information by the end of February, and that it is processed and available by mid-March. An early run is not broken; it is early, and it will need repeating.
Volume. Auto-fill My Return will send up to 500 T5008 slips. Past that it answers with an error saying there are too many to send, which is a real outcome on an actively traded account and not a sign anything is wrong with your setup.
What this means for a firm’s April
The returns that are fast are the ones Auto-fill covers almost completely. The returns that are slow are not slow because they are complicated — they are slow because somebody is sitting with a bag of paper, sorting it, totalling it, and typing it into a worksheet a line at a time.
That is the same work whether the destination is TaxCycle, ProFile, DT Max or Taxprep Cloud. Rollover and Auto-fill have taken the slips. Nothing has taken the paper.
What we do about it
KeyGlance reads exactly the paperwork Auto-fill cannot: the receipts, the rental records, the self-employment logs. Every figure stays linked to the spot on the page it was read from, so you check it against the document instead of retyping it, and it goes into TaxCycle, Taxprep Desktop, ProFile, Taxprep Cloud or DT Max on your own Windows machine. It never files anything with the CRA.
Questions we get asked about this
Does Auto-fill My Return include medical expenses?
No. Auto-fill My Return carries information issuers file with the CRA, and out-of-pocket medical expenses are not filed with anybody. A pharmacy printout, a dentist's invoice and a receipt for glasses reach the CRA only when a preparer types them onto the return.
Why are some slips missing when I run Auto-fill My Return in February?
Because the service can only send what the CRA holds at the moment you ask. The CRA says it should receive most third-party information by the end of February, and that it is processed and available for use by mid-March. A request made before that is not wrong, it is just early.
Is there a limit on how many slips it will send?
There is one published ceiling worth knowing: Auto-fill My Return will send up to 500 T5008 slips. Past that it returns an error saying there are too many slips to send, which is a real situation on an active trading account.