Tax Reporting

Tax season for self-directed investors usually means digging through brokerage statements, filling in spreadsheets, and hoping you didn’t miss a trade. If you’ve ever tried to work out your adjusted cost base across several accounts, you know how tedious it gets.

Greenline keeps a running tally instead. Upload your statements and your cost base builds up as you go, so April is a matter of reading a number rather than reconstructing one.

Adjusted cost base tracking

Your adjusted cost base (ACB) is what you need to work out capital gains or losses when you sell an investment in a non-registered account. It sounds simple, but it gets complicated fast when you’re buying regularly, reinvesting distributions, or moving holdings between accounts.

Greenline builds your ACB from the transaction history in the statements you’ve uploaded. The report shows, for every holding:

• Shares: how many units you hold
• Per share: the adjusted cost base of a single unit
• Total: what the whole position has cost you

It’s grouped by account type, and you can look at the current year to date or any earlier year you’ve imported. Everything is shown in Canadian dollars.

Estimated capital gains

Alongside the ACB report, Greenline keeps a running estimate of the gains and losses you’ve actually realized in your non-registered accounts this year: gains, losses, and the net of the two.

It also tells you how confident that number is. If some of your accounts were set up from a snapshot rather than a full transaction history, Greenline says so rather than quietly guessing, because a cost base carries forward from your very first buy and a gap early on affects every year after it.

What about the T1135?

If you hold more than $100,000 in specified foreign property at any point in the year, the CRA requires you to file a T1135. That includes US-listed ETFs, US stocks, and international holdings outside your registered accounts.

Greenline doesn’t produce a T1135 report today. The app lists it among the reports that aren’t available yet, and there’s nothing in Greenline that watches the $100,000 threshold for you. If you’re working out whether the form applies to you, our guide on T1135 foreign income reporting walks through the rules.

Does this apply to registered accounts?

ACB matters most for non-registered accounts, since registered accounts like TFSAs and RRSPs are tax-sheltered and there’s no gain to report. Greenline still shows you a cost base for holdings in registered accounts, grouped separately, because it’s a useful figure to have even when the CRA isn’t asking for it.

The capital gains estimate covers non-registered accounts only.

Can I use this instead of a tax professional?

No, and Greenline says so in the app. These are estimates built from what you’ve uploaded, meant to save you the spreadsheet, not to file with.

For your actual return, work with a tax professional or use certified tax software. What Greenline gives you is organized records and a cost base that’s been kept up all year, which makes that conversation a much shorter one.