[GNC] TXF Categories

[sunfish62 at yahoo.com]

David, 

The tax options feature supports US and German tax code. There is a dev who has maintained the US portion; I do not know the status of the German portion. No one has created templates for other jurisdictions. 

Users select accounts one by one and assign them to specific tax code lines, which by definition are associated with specific tax jurisdictions. Once the accounts have been assigned (I did this many years ago in my CoA) the user can select the TXF report and get a quick summary of their tax accounting and export a TXF for for use with tax software. I have never done the last part because most tax software now digests the official 1099 forms disseminated from financial institutions and employers. But I use it as a sanity check of my own accounting. 

Side note for US users: I track multiple brokerage accounts in GnuCash and I have found that it is useful to separate the taxable accounts by brokerage in my CoA. In other words, under Income:Dividends, I have subaccounts for each brokerage. When these accounts are assigned to the txf category, the result is a summary in the TXF report by brokerage, which aligns with the separate 1099 forms I receive. 

I imagine that users in other jurisdictions could use the US entries to get the same kind of sanity check that I get. After all, most jurisdictions seem to have similar categories for classifying income and expense. 

⁣David T. ​

On Mar 15, 2025, 2:41 AM, at 2:41 AM, David Cousens <davidcousens49 at gmail.com> wrote:
>David,
>
>Agreed.  It is more associated with tax reporting and specifically in
>the US. The TXF system seems to have been very specific  to the US IRS
>system but appears to now be becoming redundant in any case see
>(https://taxdataexchange.org/docs/txf/v042/index.html) [1] with a
>migration to data in FDX JSON formats for importing
>(see https://www.financialdataexchange.org/FDX/FDX/News/Announcements/Maximizing%20Efficiency_Export%20and%20Import%20FDX%20JSON%20Files.aspx).
>[2] FDX seems to be a closed shop, i.e. you need to be a business/govt
>organisation to participate as they won't accept other than
>organisational email addresses to register.  It is possible to apply
>for a waiver however.  Someone in the US might consider doing this.  
>
>The Edit-> Tax Report Options dialogue seems to associate specific
>accounts within GnuCash with specific US IRS forms (and perhaps even
>specific information within those forms) i.e. it maps the account
>structure setup within GnuCash onto the US IRS form submission
>requirements. 
>
>AFAIK it does not add any properties to the accounts structure within
>GnuCash itself but constructs the mapping table used in the
>construction of the report and the TXF export file, so to use it you
>have to setup the account structure in a manner which can  be mapped
>onto the IRS requirements as we have prviously suggested to Fred. The
>Reports->Tax Schedule Report and TXF Exports generates the required
>output.  The report author may be able to give Fred more specific
>advice on using it
>
>I haven't explored it further as it has no relevance to the Australian
>taxation system although a similar tax report could obviously be made
>for the tax system in any specific country. The ATO does not use the
>TFX or FDX formats as such and has its own set of digital form formats
>which are in XBRL which is an extended xml specific to business
>reporting requirements.  The ATO also likes setting up closed shops
>with software developer groups and you can't register as a digital
>service provider unless you are a company. Their file format
>specifications do not appear to be publicly available, possibly for
>security reasons, although one would hope they are not relying on that
>alone to provide secure transmission and authentication of the
>originator.
>
>
>On Sat, 2025-03-15 at 00:17 +0300, sunfish62 at yahoo.com wrote:
>> David, 
>> 
>> Fred is referring specifically to the assignment of txf categories in
>> the tax options portion of GnuCash accounts. These txf categories are
>> assigned to one or more GnuCash accounts and allow a user in theory
>> to export their tax data directly to tax software. I would argue
>> that, in this case, GnuCash is, in fact implementing categories
>> (orthogonal measures of financial data sets).
>> 
>> David T. 
>> On Mar 14, 2025, at 11:58 PM, David Cousens
><davidcousens49 at gmail.com> wrote:
>> > Fred
>> > 
>> > There are no such things as "categories" in GnuCash per se. 
>> > 
>> > Any categorisation of transactions is done in GnuCash by creating
>> > different distinct sub accounts for those different categories of
>> > transactions. 
>> > 
>> > e.g
>> > 
>> > Income:Dividends:Qualified
>> > Income:Dividends:Unqualified
>> > 
>> > and then using the appropriate sub-account as the second( transfer)
>> > account in the second entry of the transaction when you record it.
>> > 
>> > David Cousens
>> > 
>> > On Fri, 2025-03-14 at 15:23 -0300, Fred Tydeman wrote:
>> > >  Is it possible to edit or add to the TXF categories?
>> > >  I would like to have separate categories for
>> > >  qualified versus non-qualified dividends.
>> > > 
>> > > 
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>> > 
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>
>[1] https://taxdataexchange.org/docs/txf/v042/index.html)
>    https://taxdataexchange.org/docs/txf/v042/index.html
>[2]
>https://www.financialdataexchange.org/FDX/FDX/News/Announcements/Maximizing%20Efficiency_Export%20and%20Import%20FDX%20JSON%20Files.aspx).
>https://www.financialdataexchange.org/FDX/FDX/News/Announcements/Maximizing%20Efficiency_Export%20and%20Import%20FDX%20JSON%20Files.aspx