Geting GnuCash to Recognise Localised tax report for UK

John Ralls jralls at ceridwen.us
Tue May 20 17:22:19 EDT 2014


On May 20, 2014, at 12:57 PM, Geert Janssens <janssens-geert at telenet.be> wrote:

> 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.

How is picking the right set of tax categories different from picking the right set of accounts? For that matter, wouldn’t it be nice if the canned sets of accounts already had the correct tax categories associated with them?

> 
> 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

Great, thanks.

Regards,
John Ralls




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