(canada corporate tax) Assets dont add up to liabilities and equity due to rounding errors. How to fix?

Question

My accounting software (waveapps) and all my invoices/receipts/bank statements rounds up to the cent. But all of the underlying T2 schedules and forms from the Canadian Revenue Agency are rounded to the dollar. How can we reconcile when numbers don't add up?

Applying the usual rounding causes my assets to not equal my liabilities and equity, and fails the various sanity checks on my return, thus preventing me to submit the return.

When things don't add up precisely, what is it that should get adjusted, assets? liabilities? or equity? (keeping in mind that the numbers I report one year have to carry in the following year)

I can't find any mention of rounding up or down in the tax guide.

(And it's not just a single dollar difference in the end. Every cell that gets filled in the government form is potentially off from the true value by an amount between 0.01 and 0.99 dollars. The error compounds linearly when cells are added/subtracted, and is worse when they are multiplied.)

Answer 1

This is a known limitation of Canada's corporate filings rounding to the dollar [in theory for convenience, but realistically it just adds a small amount of labour given the modern use of accounting software, rather than paper and pencil].

Anywhere in your Canadian return that has the ability to add a subtotal, simply add a line that says 'rounding', and put in the few $ needed to get it to balance. Alternatively, just take the most 'simplistic' listed asset, and move it up or down by $1 or $2 or whatever dollars. ie: show your cash as $1 or $2 different. Any supporting documents should then include a line referencing that you got from eg. $4,650 cash on your financial statements to $4,654 on your T2, due to rounding.