Geting GnuCash to Recognise Localised tax report for UK

Geert Janssens janssens-geert at telenet.be
Tue May 20 15:57:33 EDT 2014


On Tuesday 20 May 2014 10:02:37 John Ralls wrote:
> On 20 May 2014, at 07:54, Geert Janssens <janssens-geert at telenet.be> 
wrote:
> > On Tuesday 20 May 2014 07:45:38 John Ralls wrote:
> >> On 19 May 2014, at 23:37, Clint Redwood <clint at screwtape.co.uk> 
wrote:
> >>> Hi David,
> >>> 
> >>> Thanks for the reply. I'd heard that before, and I didn't expect
> >>> to
> >>> be able to use the export, but the accompanying report with the
> >>> tax
> >>> form lines accumulating related accounts, rather than having to
> >>> use
> >>> a spreadsheet each year and remember which accounts added up to
> >>> what.
> >>> 
> >>> There is code in the GnuCash release for a German localisation of
> >>> the report, so I naively assumed I could create a GB localisation
> >>> too. However, it is ignoring my localisation attempt.
> >>> 
> >>> I've created -en_GB versions of all the files localised as -de_DE
> >>> and it just loads the us version.
> >>> 
> >>> I'd be surprised if a stable release of gnucash ships with code
> >>> that
> >>> isn't usable so I'm just trying to figure out why my localisation
> >>> for en_GB is ignored.
> > 
> > Unfortunately the locale specific tax reports we added via a hack.
> > And the code that should load these reports explicitly checks if
> > the locale is de_DE. If not it will go for the US tax report. This
> > filtering is done in src/tax/us/gncmod-tax-us.c if I remember
> > correctly.
> > 
> > You may be able to fix this by special casing en_GB as well, though
> > I'd rather see this mess cleaned up properly by storing locale
> > dependent tax related stuff in separate directories/files per
> > locale/country and load the relevant bits whenever the right locale
> > is active.
> > 
> > That may be more than you intended to do here though :(
> 
> If there isn't already a bug report documenting that hack, there
> should be. That's a pretty bad wart.
> 
I wasn't involved in this set up but I vaguely remember the mailing list 
discussion.

The problem for doing it properly then was that tax reports are country 
dependent but GnuCash doesn't have a country selection mechanism. But 
GnuCash only works on the locale level, for example to list which 
account hierarchies to offer when setting up a new book.

Since changing this was out of scope/capabilities of the original author 
of the tax report it was added via a hack instead. The reasoning behind 
that probably being that it was better to have the report included via a 
hack than not at all.

I searched bugzilla but didn't find a bug report for this wart so I have 
added one:
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=730470

Geert


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