A TaxWorkBooks Template is a working paper, not a filing tool. It does not connect to your tax software, and nothing it produces is transmitted anywhere. What it does is read and write the same plain two-column file the software already uses for its own import and export — so the numbers you support in the workbook and the numbers you file are the same numbers, and you can prove it.
Two Directions, Two Different Jobs
The exchange runs both ways, and the two directions serve different purposes:
- Software → Template. You export the prior year’s return and paste it into the workbook’s PY Extraction tab. Every schedule’s comparative column then looks its own figures up from that grid, so the prior-year column beside each line is the filed figure rather than a re-keyed one.
- Template → software. Once the current year is supported in the workbook, the Template writes an import file of the lines it computes, and you import that into the return rather than typing the amounts in a second time.
The second direction is the one that saves keystrokes. The first is the one that saves review time, because it removes the class of error where a comparative figure was typed from a printout.
Getting Last Year’s Return Out of the Software
Export is a file-menu command that writes tax return data to a comma-separated (.csv) or Excel (.xls) file. You can run it on the return that is open, or select several client files in the client manager and run it over all of them at once — in which case you choose whether the result is one consolidated file or a separate file for each return.
Take the result into the workbook by pasting the cell-identifier column and the amount column into PY Extraction: identifier in the first column, the immediately prior year in the second, the year before that in the third. Nothing else on that tab needs touching. The schedules address the grid by position, so leave its rows where they are.
Getting the Template’s Figures Into the Return
Import is also a file-menu command — you point it at the file and confirm the file type. It can be run from an open return or from the client manager, and a single file may carry data for more than one client, in which case the software asks which client the data belongs to.
Two behaviours are worth knowing before you run it on a live file:
- Where the target cell already holds data, the imported value replaces it. Import is not a merge.
- Where the target cell is one the software calculates itself, you are prompted to confirm an override. Accepting turns a calculated cell into an overridden one, which is usually not what you want — see the section on recomputed totals below.
What the File Looks Like
The import file is deliberately dull: a list of rows, each naming one cell and the value to put in it.
- First column — the cell identifier. Second column — the value for the current year.
- An optional bracketed header row can name the target file, the return type and the language of the import. It is optional when the file covers one client and required when it covers several.
- A zero must be written as 0. A blank second column imports nothing at all — it does not clear the cell.
- Dates carried through a spreadsheet have to be text, in YYYY-MM-DD form, or Excel will hand the software a serial number.
Our Templates generate this file directly rather than asking you to save the workbook as CSV, and the reason is in the next section.
Cell Identifiers, and Forms That Repeat
A cell identifier is a dotted path: the form or schedule, then the part of it, then the field — for example a Schedule 1 addition line, or a capital cost allowance field on Schedule 8. They are not CRA line numbers, and there is no reliable way to derive one from the other; every identifier a Template emits was transcribed from the software’s own published field inventory, never guessed.
Where a form exists in several copies — one per partner, one per property, one per CCA class — the copy number appears in square brackets inside the identifier, so the second copy of a schedule is addressed distinctly from the first. That is how a Template writes a full partner allocation, or a full slip set, in one file.
Separators, Encoding, and the French-Locale Trap
The character that separates the two columns is a setting, not a constant: the software’s import/export options control the column break, the decimal separator, the thousands separator and how negatives are written, and on import the column break is detected from the file. So there is no single “correct” CSV — there is only a file that agrees with your settings.
This is why our Templates write the file with their own generator instead of leaving you to use Save As → CSV in Excel. On a French-language Windows installation, Excel writes semicolons between columns and commas inside numbers, which produces a file that looks perfectly fine, imports without an error, and puts the wrong values in the return. The generator writes fixed, known bytes: Windows-1252 encoding and Windows line endings, matching what the software’s own exports contain. If your import/export options use a column break other than the default, check the first import before trusting a batch of them.
Totals the Software Recomputes
Subtotals and carried-forward totals are calculated in the return, so the Templates deliberately do not export them — only the detail lines that feed them. Importing a total would either be ignored or, worse, accepted as an override, which silently detaches that total from the lines above it for the rest of the engagement.
If a subtotal in the return disagrees with the workbook after an import, the disagreement is real and worth investigating. That is the point: the workbook is the independent recomputation.
Corporate Returns and Partnership Returns Are Not the Same Product
The T2 corporate return and the T5013 partnership information return are prepared in two different applications from the same publisher, and their menus, options and identifier families differ. Verify the syntax against the help for the application and version you actually run before building anything on top of it.
Practically, the partnership side is also where the repeated-copy syntax earns its keep: a partnership with thirty partners means thirty copies of the allocation schedule and thirty slips, and a generated import file is the difference between an afternoon and a morning.
What Our Templates Currently Map
We publish this deliberately, because a field map that claims more coverage than it has is worse than none:
- T2 Corporate Return Workbook — Schedule 1 detail lines, excluding the computed subtotals. Other families (GIFI, Schedules 3, 4, 5, 6 and 8) are added the same way, one verified inventory at a time.
- T5013 Partnership Workbook — the lines listed on the workbook’s own Taxprep Import tab, which shows you every identifier, value and description that will be written before you write it.
In both cases the tab is visible and auditable inside the workbook. You are never asked to trust a file you cannot read.
Versions Change; Verify Against Your Own
Menu wording, dialog names and identifiers are revised between versions and between tax years. Everything above describes 2025-version behaviour as documented by the publisher on the date at the top of this page. Your software’s own help is the authority for your version, and running one import on a copy of a file — not on the live file — is five minutes that has repaid itself every time.
Trademarks and Independence
Taxprep, Corporate Taxprep and Taxprep Forms are trademarks of Wolters Kluwer. This page names them only to identify the software our Templates exchange data with. TaxWorkBooks and MB Tax Analytics are not affiliated with, authorized by, sponsored by, or endorsed by Wolters Kluwer, and no part of the publisher’s documentation is reproduced here — the descriptions above are our own, written from publicly available material. Product names are used descriptively; all trademarks belong to their respective owners.
Questions on the exchange format: [email protected]