gnuTaxes

What is it?

gnuTaxes is an Open Source tax preparation application.

HELP Wanted

This project is at risk of becoming a dead project. There has been no activity in about 2 years. This is primarily my fault. I got busy and stepped down, but never made an effort to find someone to replace me. I believe this application still has merit. The idea is sound, and technology has advanced enough in the last couple years that it shouldn't be hard to resume development. The problem is I still don't have the time to dedicate to this project. So it needs someone to take over. If you're that someone, please contact me.

Why call it gnuTaxes?

Well, really for no other reason than the obvious play on words. So far, gnuTaxes has no real association with the GNU group although it will hopefully follow the GNU coding standards. I wanted to call it GnoTaxes as originally I wanted it just to be a GNOME application, but when I decided to make it more platform independent I figured that the GNOME front end could be called GnoGnuTaxes in honor of George Bush's famous blunder.

Goals

The goal of gnuTaxes is to finally create a tax preparation application that will run on Linux or other *nixes. Preferably gnuTaxes should be as platform independent as possible, so the core functionality and user interface are being kept completely seperated. Hopefully this will enable us to create user interfaces for GNOME (GnoGnuTaxes), KDE, Motif or Lesstif and a CGI or PHP interface to make gnuTaxes useable online.

Features

When completed, gnuTaxes will have at least the following features:

Platform independent logic engine.

A interview based information gathering system.

Support for all federal and state income tax forms.

Support for non-US tax systems.

Electronic filing or Printed tax forms.

Support for yearly tax form and logic updates without needing software updates.

Uses XML as its native data format.

Uses PDF format for tax form rendering.

Uses DocBook standard for online help and documentation.

GUIs customized for GNOME, KDE, Motif/LessTif, and CGI or PHP.

Ability to import data from accounting packages such as gnuCash and Quicken.

Ability to import data from other tax packages such as TurboTax.

Version

The latest release can be found here. NOTE: gnuTaxes is still in the concept stage. The files in this release do not do anything and are generally only useful for people considering joining the development effort.

The current version is 0.0.4.

Future releases

0.0.5 - 0.0.9 - continue work on gnuTax engine library and a text only interface.

0.1.0 - release gnuTax engine library and API documentation.

0.1.x - 0.5.0 - work on graphical front-ends.

0.5.x - 0.9.x - integrate US, US states, and other non-US tax systems.

1.0.0 - release gnuTax application with complete tax system definitions by end of 2000.

Online Documentation

A very brief index of current documentation can be found here.

CVS

This project's files can be accessed via anonymous CVS using the following commands:

cvs -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs.gnutaxes.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/gnutaxes login cvs -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs.gnutaxes.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/gnutaxes co gnuTaxes

When prompted for a password for anonymous, simply press the Enter key.

You may also view the CVS repository via the web by clicking here.

The latest CVS daily snapshot can be downloaded here.

Mailing Lists

Mailing list archives can be found here.

You can subscribe and unsubscribe to the lists:

Contributions

Any help will be greatly appreciated. Specifically, we need help in all of the following areas:

C programmers for developing the logic processing engine.

GNOME, KDE, and Motif/LessTif developers to work on a GUI.

Tax accountants who can help design an interview.

PDF designers for duplicating the real-life tax forms (most US federal tax forms can be downloaded from the IRS website but we will need the ability to fill in the fields directly in the PDF file for printing).

Someone with knowledge of how the e-file system works so that we can get electronic filing.

DocBook programmers for doing documentation.

Once it gets further underway we'll need someone to host a mailing list and CVS server.

If you are interested in joining the development effort (and getting write access to the CVS tree), please create a user account on sourceforge.net and let Jim Phillips know what your username is.

Screenshots

gnuTaxes is in such an early state, there are no screenshots available. When we have some we'll post them.

Contact Information

Please contact Jim Phillips if you can contribute.

Special Thanks

Special thanks must go out to the folks at VA Linux for hosting this site and for creating .