I have capital gains and losses to report on my Canadian tax return to the CRA (I'm an individual, not a corporation). My tax-filing software (Ufile) is trying to help me generate form 5000-S3 (schedule 3) using transaction summaries (e.g. T5008).
My software asks for a "Date of acquisition" for each proceed-generating event (e.g. sale, disposition, or in-kind transfer into TFSA/RRSP, etc).
What is the date of acquisition of a property, if that property was purchased over the course of multiple trades?
I've calculated my Average Cost Basis correctly for all my transactions and I have all the info for all my purchases and sales. I can think of a few different options:
- The date of the most recent purchase preceding the sale
- The date of the initial purchase
- The date of the most recent purchase preceding the sale where I went from 0 units to more than 0. (which is usually the same as the earliest purchase, but not necessarily always that, if you sell everything (or transfer), and then re-buy in).
- Can I leave this blank? Why does the date of acquisition even matter?
I can attribute a date of purchase to every stock I buy, but when I sell, I don't generally specify which shares I sell -- I don't think that's a valid practice in Canada (but I know some US brokers let you choose). If I buy 10 shares on date A, and 10 shares on date B, and then I sell 15 shares on date C, I wouldn't know which dates are relevant.
--- Edit:
- I ended up finding a way to leave the field blank when filing. Hope this doesn't come back to bite me.
Other info
Here's the info on form 5000-Schedule 3:
Publicly traded shares, mutual fund units, deferral of eligible small
business corporation shares, and other shares
Number [ ]
Name of fund/corporation and class of shares[ ]
(Column 1): Year of acquisition [ ] <--- what to put here?
(Column 2): Proceeds of disposition [ ]
(Column 3): Adjusted cost base [ ]
(Column 4): Outlays and expenses (from dispositions) [ ]
(Column 5): Gain (or loss) (column 2 minus columns 3 and 4) [ ]
Line 13199: Total (add all the amounts under column 2) [ ]
The guide does explain how to calculate gains and losses, but I can't see anything where it explains how to calculate the actual date of acquisition.
Properties of a group are considered to be identical if each property in the group is the same as all the others. The most common examples of identical properties are shares of the same class of the capital stock of a corporation or units of a mutual fund trust.
You may buy and sell several identical properties at different prices over a period of time. If you do this, you have to calculate the average cost of each property in the group at the time of each purchase to determine your adjusted cost base (ACB) (dispositions of identical properties do not affect the ACB).
