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 put the figures it computes on its own first tab, in the layout the software’s import expects — so the numbers you support in the workbook and the numbers you file are the same numbers, and you can prove it.
The workbook is the import. Taxprep does not need a separate file from us: its import reads the first tab of whatever file it is given, and the first tab of every Template is the import tab. You hand over the .xlsx and the figures land in the return. Save As → CSV still works and is described below, as the fallback it is.
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, you point the software’s import at the workbook itself. It reads the first tab — the lines the Template computes — and posts them to the return, rather than you 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 a file and confirm the file type. Point it at the workbook. The software reads the first tab of the file it is handed, and the first tab of every Template is Import: the populated codes only, packed from the first row with no blank lines, no title, no header band and nothing else on the sheet. There is no intermediate file to produce, name, or keep beside the working paper, and nothing for a spreadsheet to reformat on the way out. It behaves the same way in Corporate Taxprep and in Taxprep Forms.
Because that tab is what the software ingests, everything written on it lands in the return — which is why it is kept deliberately bare, and why the full list of codes lives on a second tab beside it. That map shows every code the workbook can emit, its description, and the formula that produced the value; each workbook names its own, and the list at the foot of this page says which. The map is the tab to read before importing; it is never the tab you hand over.
Save As → CSV remains available and remains supported. Excel writes the active sheet, so with Import selected it produces the same rows in a file you can open in a text editor and read as bytes before importing. Use it when you want to see the payload first; use the workbook when you do not. The one hazard it carries and the workbook does not is under separators, below.
Import 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 Import Tab Holds
The tab is deliberately dull: a list of rows, each naming one cell and the value to put in it. How many fields sit on a row depends on which form the software expects, and it is not the same everywhere:
- First column — the cell identifier. Second column — the value for the current year. That pair is the whole row for the T2 workbook, which is the shape Taxprep’s own export for that form has.
- The T5013 workbook carries four fields, not two — identifier, value, a deliberately empty third column, then the description. That is Taxprep’s own layout for slip data, and the empty column is part of it rather than an omission.
- Values are written as text, not as numbers — 900000.00 is the characters, not the amount. The software posts them correctly either way, and text is what survives a locale unchanged if the rows ever go out through the CSV fallback.
- An optional bracketed header row can name the target file, the return type and the language of the import. The Templates emit none: one workbook covers one client, and a header row is required only where a file 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.
The tab carries only rows with something to say. An untouched box produces no row, and on the return workbooks a line that computes nil produces none either. The consequence is worth stating plainly, because it cuts both ways: the software writes the codes it receives and leaves every other line as it found it, so a figure already sitting in the return — rolled forward, or seeded from an earlier draft — is not overwritten by a line the workbook chose to omit. Review the return against the workbook after the first import of an engagement.
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
This section is about the CSV fallback only. A separator is something a file needs and a spreadsheet does not: hand the software the .xlsx and columns are columns, with no character standing between them and nothing to misread. Everything below applies the moment you choose Save As → CSV instead, and it is the reason that route is the fallback rather than the recommendation.
The character that separates the 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.
Excel writes that file, and Excel writes it the way the operating system underneath it asks. On a French-language Windows installation it can put 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. Nothing about a CSV announces this. If you take the fallback route, open the file in a text editor once and look at it, and check the first import before trusting a batch of them — or hand over the workbook, where the question does not arise.
Totals the Software Recomputes
Subtotals and carried-forward totals are calculated in the return, so the import tab deliberately does not carry 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 importing them in one pass 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 the workbook can seed, beside the formula behind each.
In every case the tab is visible and auditable inside the workbook, and the map beside it says where each figure came from. You are never asked to hand over a payload 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]