What to gather before your personal tax appointment

The difference between a personal tax return that takes an hour and one that drags on for weeks is almost never complexity. It is missing paperwork — a slip that never arrived, a prior-year notice nobody kept, a rental property with no record of what was spent on it.

Here is what to have in hand before you sit down with an accountant.

Start with last year

Two documents do more work than any others:

• Your prior year return. It shows what was claimed, what was carried forward, and what should recur.
• Your latest Notice of Assessment. This is the CRA's own summary of where you stand, including carry-forward amounts you may not know you have — unused RRSP room, tuition credits, capital losses available against future gains.

If you are switching accountants, these two are the handover. Without them, work gets repeated.

The slips

Most arrive by the end of February, and most are also visible in CRA My Account, which is the fastest way to spot one that never reached you:

• T4 — employment income
• T4A — pensions, self-employment commissions, some grants and scholarships
• T4E — employment insurance
• T5 — interest and dividends
• T3 — trust and mutual fund distributions
• T5008 — securities transactions
• T2202 — tuition
• T5007 — social assistance and workers' compensation

Slips are reported to the CRA independently of you. A missing one is not an omission that goes unnoticed; it is a mismatch that generates a reassessment later.

Receipts worth finding

• RRSP contributions, including any made in the first 60 days of the year
• Medical expenses — these can be pooled across a family and claimed over a twelve-month window that does not have to be the calendar year
• Charitable donations
• Childcare costs
• Moving expenses, if the move was for work or study and met the distance conditions
• Interest paid on money borrowed to invest
• Professional dues and union fees
• Tradesperson's or apprentice tools, where applicable

If your situation includes any of these, say so early

These are the categories that turn a simple return into a more involved one. They are all routine — they just need their own paperwork:

Self-employment or a side business. Revenue and expenses for the year, ideally already in bookkeeping rather than in a shoebox. Note that your filing deadline moves to June 15 if you or your spouse carried on a business, while any balance owing is still due April 30.

A rental property. Rental income, plus mortgage interest, property tax, insurance, utilities, repairs and management fees. Keep repairs separable from improvements — they are treated differently.

Employment expenses. These generally need a signed form from your employer confirming the conditions of employment. Without it the claim usually cannot be made, and the form is much easier to obtain in February than in April.

Investments sold during the year. A T5008 reports proceeds but frequently not your cost base. Without the cost base, a gain cannot be computed correctly — so purchase records matter as much as sale records.

Property you sold. Including a principal residence, which has to be reported on the return even when the gain is fully exempt.

Foreign property or income. Holdings above a reporting threshold trigger their own disclosure form, separate from the return, and it has real penalties attached.

Life changes. Marriage, separation, a new child, a move to a different province, or becoming or ceasing to be a resident of Canada. Each of these changes the return in ways that are easy to handle and expensive to miss.

The deadlines, briefly

• April 30 — filing deadline for most individuals, and the payment deadline for everyone
• June 15 — filing deadline if you or your spouse or common-law partner carried on a business; the balance was still due April 30

If you have unfiled years

File them. Catching up voluntarily is consistently better than waiting to be contacted, and there are relief provisions that sometimes apply to penalties and interest for taxpayers who come forward. Multiple unfiled years are common and fixable — the number of them is rarely the hard part.

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This is general information about how personal tax filing works in Canada, not advice for your particular situation. Thresholds, rates and forms change from year to year, so check current figures against the CRA before relying on them, or get in touch and we will work through your own circumstances.