Here’s a diagram showing all the Canadian tax software options, almost everything is made by a Canadian company except two of the most commonly used.
Please stop using turboTax and H&R Block, you’ll likely save quite a bit of money by switching to one of the Canadian owned options too. (H&R Block charges $49.98 for a typical couple, Studio Tax charges $17.50 for up to 10 returns). GenuTax is completely free to use.
Links to each of the Canadian options are available on ShopCanadianStuff.ca
The graphic is originally from ShopCanadianStuff.ca/blog
What’s everyone’s favourite? I’ve been using wealthsimple for the last couple years, honestly surprised to learn its Canadian and I don’t need to switch 🤷♂️
I used Studio Tax for a few years and found it to be adequate. Last year I tried GenuTax and instead and I didn’t like it as much. Instead of presenting you with the forms and you fulling them (which StudioTax does) GenuTax asks you a million yes/no questions one at a time. If you select “yes”, then it shows you appropriate, corresponding form to fill out.
I guess the good thing about this method is you are presented all the possibilities, the bad thing is you have to yes/no everything, including a million things that probably don’t apply to you.
Also, its not always immediately clear what form a yes/no will lead to, meaning if you select something wrong, you have to back track to correct it. (The questionnaire is linear, you can’t just jump back and forth.) if you have a very basic return, that’s probably fine. But I had some small self-employed income and international tuition, and going back and forth trying to yes/no my way to the correct forms frustrated me enough to switch back to StudioTax and start again.
I tried an alternate to but had to go back to StudioTax. The other program couldn’t deal with me claiming disability amounts for my child. Studio tax picked up a value in a field and says " hey we see you are claiming disability, make sure you have a Txxxx filed with CRA"