About ActiveACB
ActiveACB is a Canadian capital gains tax calculator built for investors and traders who need their adjusted cost base to be correct, not estimated from a T5008 that the CRA itself warns may be wrong.
The Problem
Canadian tax law requires you to track the adjusted cost base of every security you own, adjusted for every trade, dividend reinvestment, return of capital, corporate action, superficial loss, and FX conversion that affects it. Your broker reports a cost figure in Box 20 of your T5008, but the CRA’s own instructions state that it “may or may not reflect your adjusted cost base.”
For buy-and-hold investors with simple portfolios, the T5008 number is often close enough. For anyone who has traded the same security more than once, rebought after a loss, held USD cash, exercised options, or received shares from a corporate action, the T5008 number drifts further from the correct ACB with every transaction. The difference compounds silently. Most Canadians never know until they get a CRA reassessment.
What We Built
A calculation engine that parses your broker export directly, applies every CRA ACB rule, and produces a filing-ready report in seconds. No manual data entry. No spreadsheet. No missed trades.
The engine enforces: ACB pooling across all accounts, superficial loss detection with the full 61-day window and three-limiter formula, FX cash pool ACB with the $200 annual exemption, options exercise and assignment linking, corporate actions (splits, spinoffs, mergers, return of capital, name changes), and T1135 foreign property warnings. It runs over 1,200 automated test cases. A complete description of every rule is at activeacb.ca/methodology.
Who It Is For
ActiveACB currently parses Interactive Brokers Flex Query XML and Questrade Activity Report XLSX files. If you hold stocks, ETFs, options, or foreign securities in either broker, the engine handles your full trading history automatically. Multi-account upload detects cross-account superficial losses, including cases where you sold in a non-registered account and rebought in a TFSA or RRSP.
If you trade at Wealthsimple, RBC Direct, TD Direct Investing, or another Canadian broker, broader import support is on the roadmap. In the meantime, you can export your Raw Trades XLSX from any previous calculation, correct it in Excel, and re-upload it as a manual import.
Privacy and Data Handling
Your broker file is written to a temporary processing directory and deleted the moment your report is generated. No file content is ever stored in a database. Calculation results (the summary figures, not the raw file) are retained in your account history so you can re-download reports later. Your account holds your 25 most recent calculations.
Full details are in the Privacy Policy, governed by PIPEDA and applicable provincial privacy law.
Contact
Questions and support: [email protected]
ActiveACB is a Canadian product. Governing law: Province of Ontario.