Tax-aware book-keeping tool

[Christopher Browne]

On Tue, Apr 26, 2011 at 1:10 AM, Antonio T. Sun <antoniosun-N9AOi2cAC9ZBDgjK7y7TUQ at public.gmane.org> wrote:
>
> Hi,
>
> Prefix: Phew, finally I finished preparing for my tax returns,
> almost at the "last-minute", and I think it is high time for me to
> retire my home-grown book-keeping practise for my tax returns, and
> look for something that is more "off-the-shelf".
>
> Request: I'm looking for a Linux based book-keeping tool to track
> my expenses which is (better) aware of Canadian Tax laws.
>
> Details:
>
> - 1st of all, I stress again that it is better to be a simple
>  book-keeping tool, instead of an accounting software that forces
>  me to do double entries.
>
> - all I need to do, that I can think of currently, is to track my
>  expenses: *when* I spend *how much*, that belongs to *which tax
>  category*, and calculate yearly CCA for me as well.
>
> - when next tax season comes, I can just get the *summary data*,
>  having properly pro-rated according to Canadian Tax laws, and
>  hand them over to my accountant, preferably in a format that
>  popular accounting/tax-preparing software can accept.

I don't think you'll find much of anything relevant to this, and
picking Windows-based software wouldn't be too likely to change that.

I'll poke at CCA as a notable "for instance."

Accounting software tends to be oriented towards presenting GAAP
(Generally Accepted Accounting Principles) presentations of things,
and the tax policy for CCA is about as not-GAAP as things get.  There
are GAAP depreciation policies that are a little like CCA, but the
whole weird "claim half as much in year #1" bit doesn't fit with what
you'll see in accounting texts.

Determining which of the capital acquisitions fall under particular
tax policies is a "taxation activity," definitely distinct from
"financial accounting."

That's one side of things, which might be summed up as "taxation's
weird enough that forcing it into the bookkeeping seems to be a losing
battle."

(I'll observe that I once did work on data conversion where the
accounting software *did* integrate a detailed evaluation of
depreciation policies including those imposed by governments.  This
went to the arguably ridiculous extreme that they had 15 distinct
"sets of books" for various interactions with different governments.
I can't commend using SAP for your "bookkeeping" - it's pretty much
"preposterously complicated like the Space Shuttle," with concordant
astronomical license fees.  That particular project apparently cost
$35 million...)

The OTHER side of things is that if you look at the Canadian tax
software out there, none of it boasts about extensive capabilities to
do data imports.  No doubt things have changed more than a mite since
the days when I was involved with massive amounts of tax preparation
work, but back then, it wasn't evident that there would be huge
opportunities to save effort by importing bunches of data into the tax
software.

There's plenty of value in making sure that it's easy for your
accountant to grab some data from the G/L and turn it into
spreadsheets that might be used to back up tax forms.  But that's
rather more a general principle of having "open data formats" than
anything really tax-oriented.

> Further:
>
> - Do you need to track your expenses?
> - Do you use Linux solution to do that?
> - How do you it?
> - What else in your practises that I haven't thought of?
>
> Could you post back or blog about it and give me a link please?

http://linuxdatabases.info/info/finances.html

Historically, I have worked on:
a) cbb (I didn't name it, but based on the initials, I just HAD to!)
b) GnuCash
c) SQLLedger
d) Bit on LedgerSMB

I have a LedgerSMB instance kicking around that I use for some of my stuff.

I use Ledger, a purely text-based system, for GTALUG finances.
https://github.com/jwiegley/ledger
Sometimes, I access it using the compatible HLedger (in Haskell) -
http://hledger.org

Over time, I'm getting to be keener on options that have fewer moving
parts, and Ledger/HLedger definitely qualify well in that regard!
They're not multi-user friendly, but that's not necessarily a problem
everyone needs solved.
-- 
When confronted by a difficult problem, solve it by reducing it to the
question, "How would the Lone Ranger handle this?"
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