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The furnace qualifies, but the filter doesn’t.  Most material improvements to your home qualify, but not maintenance items which would typically be an annual expense.  If you renovate your deck, you can claim the screws, but not the impact wrench you bought. Click here for more info.  
Expenses incurred between Jan 1 and Dec 31, 2022 qualify for the 2022 tax return.

If you just travel to your usual place of work and back, none of those expenses are claimable, even if you’re on contract income.

So when can you claim costs for running your own vehicle?  If you’re an employee, your employer has to fill out form T2200, which declares you had to use your vehicle for work purposes, and you didn’t get reimbursed.  Then, you have to keep track of your total kilometers for the year, and the amount you used for work purposes, as well as your fuel, lease, interest, insurance, maintenance, and perhaps depreciation expenses.

The same kind of record keeping has to go into using your vehicle for business purposes, but you don’t need form T2200.  You can’t just claim a rate per km as CRA may deny the vehicle claim without the detailed record keeping.

The simplified method is a $2/day credit for each day you worked at home.  You must have worked more than 50% of the time from home for at least 4 consecutive weeks in 2022 in order to qualify. 

Talk to your accountant first.  You will typically pay anywhere from 24% to 30% of any potential refund back to these service providers, which could be thousands of dollars.  People who qualify for the DTC typically have difficulty in the functions of life, and ought not to be handing over that kind of money.  We think it’s opportunistic.  CRA has designed the forms to be quite simple to fill out, and we have enabled many of our clients in this regard as part of our usual tax services.  Talk to us first.

In most cases, medical expenses must reach a threshold of 3% of net income, or, if you’re married, 3% of the spouse with the lower net income.  If your net income is $40,000, you would have to spend more than $1200 on medical bills to begin to see the credit apply.  Sometimes it makes sense to use a 12 month rolling period including the year prior to reach the threshold.