A year of receipts leaves Dossier as one package: a summary whose totals add up, a spreadsheet that traces every figure to its document, and every original capture. Build it when the year is ready, give it to whatever files the return, and the filing itself becomes the easy part.
When the year is ready
Not filing season — whenever the year is done. The package can be built at any moment, and the right moment is when the year's documents are captured and the open questions are answered. The review queue tells you where you stand: it lists anything with a gap or an unconfirmed reading. Work it down to nothing, or decide the leftovers can travel as questions, and the year is ready to leave.
Filing season is only the deadline. It is not the method. The scramble most people associate with it — hunting slips, digging through drawers, explaining a random amount from months ago — is what happens when the gathering and the filing are done in the same week. Capture all year, and the hand-off takes an evening.
Two small checks before you share it. The package marks anything still unresolved rather than dropping it, so a skipped question travels as a question. And years are chosen one at a time — a glance that the year you built is the year you meant to send costs nothing.
What filing actually needs
Every checklist for getting ready to file says the same thing: gather your slips and your receipts first. But look at what the filing itself consumes. Tax software asks for one figure per line — your total medical expenses, your total donations, your total tool costs. A professional asks what you spent, when, on what, and where it belongs on the return.
Either way, the real work at filing time is turning a pile of evidence into totals with answers attached. Nobody filing a return has ever wished the evidence came in a shoebox. That turning-into-totals work is exactly what the package has already done.
If you file yourself
Most Canadians do, and the package is built for it. The summary gives you the total for each line; you type it into the software with the evidence one tap away. If a figure looks off, the spreadsheet lists every document behind it, and each row leads back to the original capture. No figure is ever an orphan.
One honest caution: what lands on the return is settled at filing time, when the floors and limits apply. The software works those out from your answers. The package is what that decision is made from — the full total and the proof behind it — not the decision itself.
If someone else files your return
They need the evidence, not the app. The package answers the questions the person filing the return will ask, before they ask them: what you spent, when, on what, and where you think it belongs. Anything unresolved sits on the first page of the summary instead of buried on page nine, so the open questions arrive with the documents. Every total shows its documents, and every original is included. Less back-and-forth, fewer surprises, and no envelope of loose paper changing hands.
What is in the package
The Export tab builds a single archive with four pieces:
- A summary PDF for each year. Totals by line, the open questions listed first, and the slips on hand. The totals are sums of the rows beneath them, so the summary always adds up.
- A spreadsheet, one row per document: the payee, the date, the amount, the tax the document showed, and where you filed it — a T1 line, a business category on T2125, a rental category on T776, or kept and unfiled.
- Every original capture, so each figure has its paper behind it.
- A manifest that ties it together — which years, which documents, what was built and when.
There is nothing to request and no account to sign into. You choose the years and categories, the package is built on the spot on your device, and the share sheet takes it from there. Everything in it stays yours.
What an export is not
It is not a return, and it is not a calculation of what you can claim. The totals are sums of the evidence you captured, before the floors and limits that apply when the return is filed. Dossier files nothing and decides nothing; it hands over what the decision is made from.
It is, however, the backup you should have anyway: a copy you hold yourself, in plain formats that outlive any one app. Even in a year you hand nothing to anyone, build one.