I'm not an accountant, a developer or even a current GnuCash user, but I can add a bit here. As I understand things, it would be trivial to make GnuCash work with Making Tax Digital under the current plans. Harder, but really worthwhile, would be to get HMRC to accept open-source software.
Geert Janssens-4 said open source is a barrier to acceptance. That was the case in France until recently, but I believe the French tax authorities have now bowed to pressure to allow open source software for VAT submissions. I think what will happen is that if you get audited they will audit your software too. If you're found to have forked it unofficially, I guess you get busted for that as well as for whatever figures you might have fiddled. HMRC previously said free solutions would be available, and the House of Lords is leaning on them to make good on that promise. Well, technically there are free solutions -- I'm looking at Wave plus VitalTax to do the actual submission -- but there is no open source. With hundreds of thousands of UK micro-businesses moaning that they will have to pay monthly subscriptions for new software, there should be a big opportunity for GnuCash if that's what you are after. A Belfast company called Flax & Teal <http://flaxandteal.co.uk> uses GnuCash and is shouting at HMRC. They might be a good starting point if anyone here wants to take it further. Really irritating is the fact that all the HMRC-approved software has to do is put data into the same nine boxes that are on the existing VAT portal. I heard that originally HMRC planned to ask for details of each VAT transaction, which makes sense for fighting fraud (I guess you could follow VAT payments along the chain from one company to the next). But they’ve abandoned this, so the amount of data transmitted is really trivial. I've spoken with developers of the database manager FileMaker Pro, and although it's beyond my skills I am sure the necessary authentication is really easy if you understand OAuth. You can sign up with HMRC for a developer account and their documentation looks pretty good. -- Sent from: http://gnucash.1415818.n4.nabble.com/GnuCash-Dev-f1435356.html _______________________________________________ gnucash-devel mailing list gnucash-devel@gnucash.org https://lists.gnucash.org/mailman/listinfo/gnucash-devel
