For UK users: Will gnucash get ready for Making Tax, Digital ?

[Alain Williams]

On Thu, Jul 27, 2017 at 12:52:41AM +0000, Buddha Buck wrote:

> GnuCash does not currently (to my knowledge) support any
> jurisdiction-specify tax policy or reporting requirements. To do so for one
> would imply that it should do so for all, and that is a maintenance
> nightmare. As such, I think it more likely that someone would write a
> program that can take reports or data that GnuCash can already generate
> (CSV exports? OFX exports?) and uploads the necessary info to HMRC.

A small program that takes a well defined import and can talk the HMRC Making
Tax Difficult protocol might be the best way forwards; similar programs could
then also be written to talk to the tax people in other countries - without
cluttering up the core of Gnucash.

I am not sure, however, if this would be enough to keep HMRC happy - they seem
to want verification of the whole accounts program ... I am talking about a
standalone shim/add-on.

I know many companies that have their own accounts s/ware, written over many
years that does just what they need. MTD could cause huge problems if there is a
lot of effort in getting these certified or if the companies need to change to
use an off-the-shelf/bought-in package.

I don't think that HMRC have thought about it from anything other than their own perspective.

On Wed, Jul 26, 2017 at 08:03:45PM -0700, John Ralls wrote:

> GnuCash can generate TXF files that certain US and German tax prep software can support. Alex Aycinena maintains the former and Christian Stimming the latter, but Christian has had real life intervene and doesn’t at present have time to contribute code to GnuCash so I suspect that the German version is out of date.
> 
> If anyone else would like to contribute a similar report for their country we’ll be happy to add it to the distribution, but one should bear in mind that doing so is a commitment to maintain it with typically annual updates.
> 
> That applies to MTD as well: Of our current regular contributors only Mike Evans is British; if he’s not motivated to develop the support someone else from the UK will have to step up or it won’t happen.

I would be willing to help here.

However: I know nothing about Gnucash, neither as a developer nor a user. My own
small business accounts are essentially manual; if it were not for MTD I would
not see any benefit in changing this - so I want what will be least effort to
keep HMRC off my back.

-- 
Alain Williams
Linux/GNU Consultant - Mail systems, Web sites, Networking, Programmer, IT Lecturer.
+44 (0) 787 668 0256  http://www.phcomp.co.uk/
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