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Comment by WalterBright | Hacker News Reader

Every year I call up one or two of their tech support numbers, and suggest they add a button labeled "download everything I need to give to my accountant for the last tax year." Every year they are astonished at this suggestion, say what a great idea it is, and next year nothing has improved.

Am I really such a unique snowflake that nobody else even thinks of this?

Maybe I should patent it. It's obviously not obvious!

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There's no incentive, but you should probably really be pushing the Accountants of (Country) professional org (or whatever it's called) to support this.

They could register a branding for compatible download systems.

The thing is different people have different tax needs. Some people have very tax filings while others are very complex and some things can't be downloaded at all. It would be great but it's just not possible. FYI I work in a related field and I can tell you some tax filings are complicated!

Also not every source generates valid data files :(

Just because it's difficult to handle 100% of use cases doesn't mean you can't easily solved 80% of use cases. The suggestion the parent and grandparent comments are making is simply to add a button which combines the previous year's statements (understanding that not everyone's fiscal year matches the calendar year) with all the documents that are already in a separate section named "tax documents" into a single download. More generally, they're just suggesting things like naming the file for January's statement as e.g. "2016-january-statement.pdf" instead of the same generic name as every other month's statements.

Saying that those suggestions aren't valuable or worthwhile just because 100% of use cases can't be accounted for probably isn't the best way of deciding which features should be implemented (and if it were, then it seems like most of their current features should have never been built since they rarely seem to handle even 80% of use cases).

My brokerage account allows me to search for statements and then check off the ones I want to generate a PDF for, they then get combined into a single PDF. Of the three banks I deal with it was the only one with this feature made catching up on my statements so much easier.

It certainly is possible because every banking site has a fixed set of downloads for a particular year. There's no problem at all putting them in a zip file and making that available for download.

For example, for a checking account there are:

1. The monthly statements 2. The transaction data in CSV, QIF, QXF formats 3. The tax filings (1099) 4. Overdraft notices, safe box bills

If we built that software, how far would we be from not needing accountants?

Collecting the data can be automated. Classifying it, not so. I.e. what is a business expense, what is not, etc., all require knowledge that is not reasonably available to the computer until a human classifies it.

For example, I fill up at a gas station. Is that for a business purpose, or not? The computer cannot know. An awful lot of such decisions need to be made.

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