This year, my beloved TELEFILE shut down for filing my taxes over the phone. I found this to be a great utility to file my taxes without the hassle of sending in any paper forms.
With the cancellation of this service, I was surprised to find that there were free tax programs out there vetted by the Canada Revenue Agency so I decided to check some out.
I had originally thought I would use an application for the computer but then I noticed online services. Like any good service…online is the best as they can be updated if a problem is found. With stand alone applications, there always requires new updates.
I decided to try out Simple Tax. The only thing that scared me was to provide my SIN number to an organization which isn’t the Federal Government of Canada. I find this to be strange considering how much the GoC talks about safeguarding your SIN as much as possible.
But honestly, that was my only negative comment about Simple Tax. Simple Tax truly is simple for a well-seasoned tax veteran as myself. I have to admit that it definitely helped that I am familiar with the paper forms and had done my taxes by hand beforehand. This way, I know if I’m missing anything when filing by Simple Tax.
Simple Tax isn’t like Turbotax or one of those ‘wizard’ programs. It’s a site that depends on YOU for what information it should ask. Do you have T4s? Do you have T5s? You need to tell them that. Once that’s done, it’s easy peasy.
I also enjoyed how it saw that I was married this past year so it allowed me to also fill out my spouse’s form, generate the NETFILE file to upload, print my tax form to PDF and bingo bango, the process is complete.
I will definitely use the service again. The only disappointment is that I messed up somewhere by doing it by hand and now owe $275! This could have been avoided by using Simple Tax next year. 🙂
