Geting GnuCash to Recognise Localised tax report for UK

[Geert Janssens]

On Tuesday 20 May 2014 14:22:19 John Ralls wrote:
> 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?

It probably isn't different. The problem also exists for picking the 
right set of accounts IMO. The account hierarchy window should ask the 
user for a country and propose account hierarchies/default currency/... 
based on that country.

And yes it makes sense to me as well to link tax categories to the 
account hierarchy. I haven't studied the code to know why this wasn't 
done.

Geert