On Sunday 28 November 2004 15:30, BandiPat wrote:
Kevin, The time you spend wasting a call & email to MS controlled companies could be better spent in creating exactly what you want in a database or spreadsheet program on your own computer! You could easily setup the forms, the data would be saved and maintained yearly and that would end need for the QuickTax you've been using.
Yah but . . . QuickTax and the other major tax programs do more than just give you a pretty form to populate a database or spreadsheet. The good ones give you a tax accountant in a box. They research the tax laws/regs, including all the changes/updates for the current year, and often find stuff, and make suggestions that you might not have recognized (unless you happen to be a tax lawyer/accountant yourself). If it weren't for those advantages, we might as well just fill out the paper forms and use snail-mail. That'd be the major reason why nobody has done a real tax-return program as an open source project. Coding the interface and spreadsheet functions is no big deal for an experienced programmer or three. The hard part is to create the modules for each separate country (and province or state within each country) to reflect all the tax rules and to take advantage of all possible deductions and loopholes. There are lots of open-source programmers, but hardly any open-source accountants and tax lawyers. :-) I was just hoping that somebody knew of something. Kevin