Your cross-border clients arrive with a shoebox
They could arrive with a filled T776 or Schedule E instead, with the figures already sitting on the lines they report on. You review a return rather than rebuild one.
Free top plan for your practice. No volume commitment, nothing to sign.
When it states a tax rule, it names the source
BorderBird has a rule it applies to itself: a tax figure comes from an IRS or CRA primary source — a form and a line, a publication and a page, a code or Act section — or it does not ship. Not a blog, not a law firm’s summary, not a recollection.
For a landlord that is reassurance they cannot act on; they have no way to check it, which is why they bought software in the first place. For you it is the difference between reviewing a file and rebuilding it. When a mortgage payment is cut down to interest only on T776 line 8710, the app says which guide says so — CRA guide T4036, whose words are that you cannot deduct the repayments of principal on your mortgage or loan on your rental property — and names the amount it excluded and why. You are checking a citation, not trusting a vendor.
Stated precisely, because the distinction is the sort you would check: figures are grouped onto named CRA and IRS lines, and where the product makes a statement of tax rule it carries that rule’s source. It does not print a publication reference beside every individual number.
What comes out of the client's ledger
Income and expenses grouped onto the CRA line each category reports on, from the client's own ledger. Rent is recognised in the month it applies to rather than the month the cash landed, which is what makes a December payment for January stop drifting between years.
Per-recipient slips built from recorded ownership shares, so a co-owned property reports to each owner at their percentage instead of all of it to whichever one is named on the title record.
Whether the net basis applies is driven by whether an election is actually recorded as on file, not assumed — and the page says which basis it used, so a gross-basis figure is never silently presented as a net one.
The US side of the same ledger. Foreign amounts convert at the annual average rate for the year the figure belongs to, so a multi-year report does not retranslate 2023 rent at today's rate.
Per-recipient slips for non-resident-alien owners — including the ECI case, where the gross is still reported in box 2 with box 7a at zero and the chapter-3 exemption code set, rather than the recipient dropping off the form.
Tracked to its lapse and its TIN, which are the two ways it quietly stops working. See below — this is the one most worth a glance before you start a file.
The instructions: a Form W-8ECI 'will remain valid for a period starting on the date the form is signed and ending on the last day of the third succeeding calendar year'. Nothing announces the lapse — the withholding simply restarts. BorderBird derives the expiry from the signing date and flags it months ahead, because renewing can mean chasing an ITIN first. It also treats a form with no US TIN as not yet in force rather than quietly good, since the instructions require one for the form to be valid.
An Airbnb or VRBO payout export goes in as-is and is split into gross earnings, the platform fee and any tax already withheld. Tested against a real full-year export — 638 rows across 7 listings — which has no withholding column at all, so that field is read when present and never required.
CCA on the Canadian side with recapture to T776 line 9947, and on the US side the part most software gets backwards: straight-line residential rental is excluded from §1250 recapture by the Form 4797 instructions, so the depreciation becomes unrecaptured §1250 gain instead. Each of those carries its citation in the code. Deliberately not the capital gain itself — see below.
The gaps, listed rather than left to be found
You would find these in the first hour. Better that you find them here.
- No cost base, so no T1135 threshold tracking. BorderBird does not hold what a property cost, so it cannot tell you whether a client has crossed a specified-foreign-property threshold. It will not guess at one either.
- No FIRPTA or capital-gain estimate on a disposition. That follows from the same gap: without an acquisition cost there is no gain to compute. Recapture is modelled because it runs off depreciation we do hold; the gain is not.
- No day counting for residency tests. There is a substantial-presence calculator on this site as a free tool. It is not wired into the client’s file.
- It does not file, and it is not advice. It produces records and filled forms. The position taken on them is yours.
A free practice account, and a listing
If you prepare returns for cross-border landlords, we will give you the top plan free for your own practice — so you can put a real client year through it before recommending it to anyone — and list you where landlords looking for a preparer will see you.
No volume commitment and nothing to sign. Tell us roughly how many non-resident or cross-border clients you handle and what you currently rebuild by hand every spring, and we will tell you honestly whether this saves you anything. If it does not, that is a useful answer too.
Put one client's year through it
Email us and we will set up a free practice account. If it does not save you time on the first file, tell us — we would rather know than not.