I'm not sure whether I'm paranoid or just curious, but when I see a barcode, I want to know the information it contains.
When that barcode appears above a signature line, and a declaration that the information given is correct and complete, I really want to know!
In TaxCycle, you can hover over any barcode to see the information it contains, like this example from the T1 Condensed form.
From the fly over, you can see that the barcode contains a SIN (870000007), birthdate (19590424), province or residence (Ontario - twice), spouses SIN (870000015), spouses name (Will), taxpayer's name (Mary Anne One), an address and a postal code. The rest of the information is line numbers followed by values, and separated by dashes. For instance, 1019000 (underlined in red) means line 101 contains a value of $9000. Most of the fields are dollars only, except for fields that appear with dots to the right (look on page 4 of the jacket to see what I mean) - these values are shown including cents. For instance, line 479 has a dot beside it on page 4. Thus 479163260 means that line 479 has a value of $1632.60.
For those interested in history, this is very close to the format originally used by EFILE when we first piloted it back in 1990.
We originally built this to help with testing, but decided to leave it in the shipping version of TaxCycle. Some of our customers might be paranoid too. (or just curious! **)
(** If you are really curious, you can hold down ctrl+shift while clicking on a barcode to copy the information to your clipboard. You can then paste it into another program and make a more detailed exploration.)