The T5008 that does not print a cost base
Box 20 is frequently empty, which means the number the return needs is not printed anywhere on the paper. Nothing can read it off the slip, Auto-fill cannot supply it, and an active trading account arrives as thirty pages of this.
Why it is missing
A T5008 reports a disposition: what was sold, when, and for how much. Box 20, the cost or book value, is frequently blank — not an error, and not something a better slip would fix.
The broker reports what the broker knows. If the securities were transferred in from another institution, inherited, received through a plan, or bought long enough ago to predate the account’s records, the broker never held the purchase price. The proceeds are theirs to report. The cost is not.
So the number the return needs is not printed anywhere on the paper. That is the whole difficulty, and it is worth being precise about, because it is a different problem from a slip that is hard to read. No amount of scanning, magnifying or re-reading produces a figure that was never on the page.
What that rules out
- Auto-fill My Return. It brings the slip down as filed. A box the issuer left empty arrives empty, because the CRA’s copy is the same slip.
- Any document reader, ours included. If it is not printed, there is nothing to read. A reader that returns a confident figure here has produced it from somewhere other than the document.
- The summary’s own totals. A broker summary prints column totals at the foot, and on a page of thirty dispositions a total is the most plausible-looking wrong answer available for any single row.
Where the figure actually comes from
Somewhere outside the slip, every time: the client’s own purchase confirmations, the transferring institution’s book value at transfer, the estate’s valuation, or a schedule the client or a previous preparer has been keeping. Some brokers issue a separate realised gain and loss report alongside the T5008s which does carry a cost base — it is worth asking for by name, because clients rarely send it unprompted.
The practical consequence is that a T5008-heavy return has a step in it that is not data entry at all: it is a request to the client, and it is the one worth making early rather than in the last week of April.
The other thing about this slip
Volume. One security sold in ten tranches is ten slips, and an actively traded account produces a summary running to dozens of pages. Auto-fill will send up to 500 T5008 slips and answers with an error past that, which is a real outcome rather than a theoretical ceiling.
That shape — many rows, one page, totals at the foot, one column routinely empty — is why the T5008 is the document that breaks readers. The failure worth avoiding is not a missed value; it is a confident one taken off the wrong row.
What we do about it
KeyGlance reads a broker summary as a table rather than as one receipt, takes printed totals only where a total is what is being asked for, and returns a missing cost base as empty with a note saying so — never as a row it picked. Values it is unsure about block approval rather than passing silently. It never files anything with the CRA.
What KeyGlance does · Every T5008 box · What Auto-fill cannot reach
Questions we get asked about this
Why is box 20 blank on my client's T5008?
Because the broker is not always required to know it. Box 20 is the cost or book value, and a broker reports what it holds — which does not include what the client paid if the securities were transferred in from another institution, inherited, or bought before the broker's records begin.
Can Auto-fill My Return supply the missing cost base?
No. Auto-fill brings down the slip as filed, so a box the issuer left empty arrives empty. If the figure is not on the slip it is not in the CRA's copy of the slip either.
Can KeyGlance read it off the document?
No, and it will not pretend to. If the cost base is not printed there is nothing on the page to read, so the value comes back empty with a note rather than as a confident guess. A plausible wrong number on a capital gain is worse than a blank one.