Hello, I have just gone through this for one of our adult children. We use the Windows version (up to four Netfile submissions) and install on our computer, as opposed to using the web version. What I did is:
(1). made a duplicate copy of the .u22 file from last year for the whole family, renamed it. This .u22 file was _not_ used but I wanted a backup just in case ! (*). (2). ran UFile 2023 and for the rest of the family, brought the original .u22 file forward, thus importing everyone's history, then deleted the former dependent, and carried on to generate tax returns for everyone but our young adult. (3). for the young adult, ran UFile 2023 and starting from zero set up a new family comprising just that one person. Entered name, address, telephone etc. (4). To bring in the person's history, opened 2022 tax return pdf for that person and entered values on the UFile 2023 Prior Year Info (Line by Line) page. (5). But not done yet! The Prior Year Info page doesn't include lots of things which vary from person to person. If you are doing this, look for tuition/education federal credit and provincial credit carried forward, RRSP limit from prior year, unused federal donations/gifts carried forward, and items specific to your young adult. There could be different items for different people. Basically, look through the 2022 pdf and when you have generated a draft pdf for 2023, look to see if any calculation is based on prior history. Some of these items are on the 2022 Notice of Assessment in addition to last year's UFile tax return pdf. (And by the way, the CRA appears to truncate the numbers so that fractions of a dollar are lost each year, so their values can be one or two dollars lower that the UFile tax return whose values are at the precision of a penny.)
I agree with everyone else who posted: Modernizing the UFile code to have the ability to turn a dependent into a family head should have been done years ago, and come on, the software to do what I just described above can't be very complicated on the scale of what is already there! UFile decision makers, what are you waiting for?
(*) Making a duplicate copy of 2022 at the outset was just done out of prudence. If for some reason I wanted to go back and run UFile 2022 to check something for the former dependent I would use the copied file so as to not unwittingly change the history for anyone else in the original .u22 file. Avoidance of Murphy’s Law, in other words.
