So, like many of you, I have made the break from Quicken to KMyMoney.
The only remaining tendril that has me connected to windows is Turbotax.
(Don't talk about online filing of taxes; first my returns are usually too complicated for the simple forms online and second, I don't trust the cloud with that much personal information. And I would prefer to avoid windows emulators.)
So, an alternative is to get KMM to print out tax related summaries and then type them in to the various forms. That is cumbersome.
I would really like to know if there is an ubuntu-friendly package that handles many IRS forms a la TurboTax. Thanks
A

Only thing I am aware of is "Open Tax Solver". You can find it on SourceForge.
It is usually quite late getting its forms together, especially for my state. And it is much more work to use than TT. You do have to print out all your data from KMy$ and then enter that data into the forms presented by OTS. But it is a local program you run on your own computer, so your data stays with you.

I have only played with it a little to see if it would be viable in the future. I have not actually submitted a tax return with it.

Tax return software is a huge missing item in the pantheon of Linux applications. I keep a Windows computer alive (on VirtualBox) specifically so I can run TaxAct.

Open Tax Solver looks like a good start. Unfortunately it does not have my state (Kansas). It does appear to have all the forms I need. 8889 is a requirement for me. I may need other forms for investments, too. Gotta check with last year's return to see what I wound up filing.

As far as I can tell, it does not directly print the tax forms. It only calculates the numbers, which you then have to transfer to the forms by hand. It can also fill out PDF files that are directly downloaded from the IRS. Finding those form files can be a challenge.

Tax return software is rocket science. It is not easy, and it probably cannot be done by a handful of part-time developers. I think a truly useful application will require a team of full-time developers and tax law experts. That means a substantial budget. At a guess (finger in the wind) 5 to 10 million dollars per year. Is there a market of that size?

Bill Gee

thanks very much for the input, guys. I guess I will stay with turbotax for awhile. I too was running it in a virtualBox, but I think I will try Wine if for no other reason, to learn another method. A

If anyone gets TT to work on Wine, they should give feedback on winehq.org or post to this topic. In recent years, TT has had product activation, and the Wine compatibility ratings have been poor: TurboTax

[quote="Stephen Leibowitz"]If anyone gets TT to work on Wine, they should give feedback on winehq.org or post to this topic. /quote]

Now that I have tried it, Stephen, I understand your post. Looks like Virtual Box has to stick around just because of TTax.
Thanks for the reply
A

Hello! I don't think there is an any better option; at least I haven't discovered one yet. The internet is full of platforms but, remember to different how to make a fake check stub and a real one. Some platforms are just a scam that wants to get money from you. To not have any "surprises," check this characteristic first. If you find something unexplored that works excellently and it's not just a primary template, don't forget to share it with us. I'm convinced a lot of people will appreciate it.

I don't understand why you don't like KMyMoney, but I truly think it's the best option right now. I mean, do you have a better option? The only thing that I would like to get would be a system that would automatically calculate all of your revenues after taxes and deductions. That would be incredible. Just imagine how much time we would save due to that, and how many nerves as well, actually! At least we can calculate salaries after taxes and deductions, which is also pretty good. By the way, do you think the taxes would get even higher?

I can't speak for others, but I have found using KMM to gather info I needed for taxes quite hard.

The following is going to sound harsh, and I do understand the complexity of building software, creating FLOSS, and creating accounting software specifically. Please do not take it as criticism of anyone's work. The task of creating good, versatile accounting software is hard in and of itself. I am thankful that we have KMM at all.

Personally, I think KMM could improve if we had the mindset of facilitating gather info needed to understand:
- Status of accounts (harder than it seems sometimes).
- Progress (annual/monthly reports, passive income).
- Performance (how are things changing over time? How much have I put into an investment vs the current value?)
- Tax and reporting obligations (e.g., draft raw data needed for taxes for me if simple enough (job + dividends); calculate max value of account over the year; handle different currency exchanges for the same currency (IRS's EUR/USD rate vs market's EUR/USD rate), list how much did I pay on medical expenses with a non-FSA/HSA card?)
- Lowering maintenance burden on users (gather all data automatically from banking institutions, yahoo finance).
- Lowering maintenance burden on developers (it seems like a few people are taking most of the burden, but a lot of us could potentially contribute).

A lot of it is there, but many features are either buggy or unintuitive (and sometimes it's almost impossible to know which one it is). When you approach any of these tasks seriously you are met with walls at every turn. For example, I am often met with reports that do not show any data or do not show data that (I think) should be in.

(The above is true for nearly every FLOSS accounting software.)

A lot of what I'd need from software like this, and based on what is mentioned in these forums, others do too, is not more features in KMM, but perhaps fewer features and more ways to extend it/script it.

KMM seems to support SQL, which could allow others to just query a sqlite file directly for the data that KMM doesn't provide. But it's unclear to me how well SQL is supported atm or whether I'm going to find any features missing or data gone if I switch my 10year KMM file to SQL format.

Ivan

I have had a very good experience using KMyMoney to do my US taxes. But it required proper setup from the onset:

First, I used a prior tax return to setup my Categories. I created a category for every entry I will need to enter in the tax program I use. For example, I couldn't simply set up a "Dividend" category. I needed to create an "Ordinary Dividends" category and a sub-category of "Short Term CG Distributions" in the hierarchy. Each category required this kind of analysis.
I have also found that when I select to Organize Reports by Category, it will only display a sub-category of one level, so I needed to re-organize my categories to only have a single sub-level in its hierarchy. That required me to rework how I defined my Categories.

I needed to report on Estimated Taxes Paid and they are paid from April thru January of the next year, so I had to use the facility in KMyMoney to define a Fiscal Year that starts on April 15. That allowed me to create a Custom report for Estimated Taxes Paid with a date filter of Last Fiscal Year.

Next, I created custom reports. I was able to create a report for every 1099 form I receive. When I get a 1099 form, I compare it to my custom reports and 99% of the time, it matches perfectly. If there is any discrepancy, I investigate and resolve whether it is my error or the issuer's error. I found 2 errors this year that were both issuer errors and the issuers sent amended forms.

Lastly, I created custom reports that correspond to what I have to enter on each tax form for items not already covered by the 1099 custom reports.

This all took a lot of setup work and some fine tuning as I used it but ultimately I found it allowed me to prepare my taxes extremely quickly and easily. I have used this system for several different people with different requirements and it has worked equally easy for each person.

I have found several bugs with reports that don't ever seem to get corrected but I have always been able to find a different way to filter my reports that allows me to get the results that I need.

The more I get into and experiment with KMyMoney, the more I become impressed with the program. I switched to it from Quicken and initially, I missed some of the tools I had in my version of Q (I either used Premier or Home&Business versions). But as I changed my thinking from "how did I do something in Quicken?" to "how can I do this even better in KMyMoney?" I began to appreciate how much thought went into the design of KMyMoney and how powerful the program can be.

Ivan Perez wrote:KMM seems to support SQL, which could allow others to just query a sqlite file directly for the data that KMM doesn't provide. But it's unclear to me how well SQL is supported atm or whether I'm going to find any features missing or data gone if I switch my 10year KMM file to SQL format.

Sorry to not have noticed this earlier. There have been plenty of other discussions of how KMM uses SQL. Basically, when using the SQL backend, it just treats is as another way to save the data. ALL data is saved, there is nothing omitted. After saving as SQL, you can later re-save as XML/KMY. However, it does not really use all the aspects of a relational database. As with the XML/KMY storage, it reads in all the data at the beginning, and only saves it back to the database when you do an explicit save. It does allow you to use SQL to query your data in ways that are not convenient or possible within the program itself. However, depending on how determined you are, you can also do that parsing the xml file directly. Yes, SQL is much easier, but I have actually done some very specific queries using perl and XML::LibXML and HTML::Entities. The script isn't pretty, but it works for me, and I can continue to use the XML back end.