Open Tax Solver | Hacker News Reader

Open Tax Solver

opentaxsolver.sourceforge.net

128 pointscdjk35 comments

The mathematical part of me thought this tackled some optimization problem with trade-offs related to taxes. Cool software nonetheless :)

This is fine I guess for a simple 1040 filing, but I've never seen anything open source that can handle importing and calculating profit/loss for hundreds of day trades across multiple brokerages with wash sale logic. TurboTax for all its warts is still a godsend to me and far cheaper than an accountant.

If you are relying on Turbotax, you are making a big mistake. I think they have stopped improving it much and now just "milk the cow" mode. I can think of 10 thousand improvements but each year they are same old same old. So I went to a very competent CPA just to double check if TT was maxing out. It turned out that I was losing significantly in TT. For example, TT did not identified wrong cost basis that often comes from the brokers like Fidelity. CPA noticed them in a second. TT also failed to make sure I was saving on taxes paid to state by various channels. If you are giving IRS more than $10K in taxes, it is worth finding and hiring a CPA who often charges less than $500.

> can handle importing and calculating profit/loss for hundreds of day trades across multiple brokerages with wash sale logic

Excel?

Seriously, that sounds like a pretty simple spreadsheet to me. (Although you probably don't want to actually do it in Excel, 365*"hundreds" is a lot of rows)

I never understand the text-to-speech guide videos. It's a huge turn off for me, like "oh maybe I won't use this software rather". idk why really, but it just feels so wrong.

Also I know it's money, pennies, but Amazon Polly is kinda good and with a few minutes of EQ touch up you can make it 100% better than the default OSX/Windows text-to-speech

Indeed, I generally associate those videos with low/0 effort YouTube content farms trying to make a quick buck on ad revenue.

Same, I would much rather have no audio. Or, better yet... just record it yourself, or find a friend willing to.

Might consider getting it off ad-ridden sourceforge to lend credibility to an otherwise nice looking project

...or maybe it's better to have simple ads supporting a straightforward code hosting site rather than allowing your code to be ingested into some AI model, or whatever other hidden uses, and used against your will by Microsoft?

you know sourceforge has inserted adware into downloads before, right?

To be fair, that was under different ownership. One of the first things the new owners did after the acquisition was to stop that practice.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/4n3e1s/the_state_...

Imho their reputation is burned. People don’t pay attention to ownership changes or the fact that they stopped that practice (especially since they haven’t redesigned the site much, still looks and feels like the old crap).

> People don’t pay attention to ownership changes

I paid attention when MSFT bought Github.

OT: Why is every company's response to "deceptive ads that sneak in via programmatic ad exchanges" (AKA: every ad ever) to review some subset of them, after they're already displaying them, instead of ads requiring approval before they are ever displayed like they should?

Because that's not as profitable.

GitLab is open source and has no ads. It's relatively popular, you can learn more about it [here](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com)

Not all projects have the resources to self host GitLab CE. Actually compute resources may not be much, but keeping it up to date with security patches can be burdensome.

Dunno why you got downvoted. Some FOSS projects have zero server resources, and GitLab updates are... well... let's just say I had to turn off automatic updates for our instance at work because of how frequently they broke it, meaning I have to manually update it every few weeks.

gitlab.com has no ads either, and does not require hosting GitLab CE.

The parent comment explicitly said "open source", which only CE qualifies as.

But yeah GitLab.com is a great source available host/forge. I use it for my projects :).

This is my favorite kind of Open Source project! It's obviously a labor of love and it has a wide impact. Truly this is for the greater good.

The icing on the cake is that there is a nice TO DO list guiding new contributions.

I want it to use deep learning algorithms so that it could produce a tax return that, emotionally, seems real, but in reality is just a bunch of eyeballs mixed blended with FSA rules.

How does it handle crypto? So far the tax solutions I've seen are cost prohibitive, getting quickly more expensive as the number of transactions being tracked increases.

Why is crypto so special? Don't you just report realized gains as investment income and let the tax software do its thing?

There are different kinds of "investment income". Selling cryptocurrency (or exchanging one currency for another) generally results in capital gains, for which you need to track and report each individual tax lot along with its cost basis.

In contrast, if you receive a bunch of interest or dividend payments from stocks that you own, you generally only need to report the total from each brokerage or other account.

A broker typically sends both you and the IRS a 1099-B reporting the details of the sale of stocks, etc. Having this form makes your tax filing relatively easy.

Cryptocurrency exchanges don't necessarily issue these forms, which means that the taxpayer has to report the details themselves. In particular, the IRS wants each transaction reported on a separate row of Form 8949, which may be laborious for those with many transactions.

(Note that an acceptable alternative is summarizing on Form 8949 itself and attaching details of the individual transactions separately. See "Exception 2" at https://www.irs.gov/instructions/i8949#idm140393400093152)

You should use cointracker: https://www.cointracker.io/

If you want to DIY instead, I think it's an invocation of wikihtmltopdf + a simple script that turns CSVs into PDFs.

How do crypto concepts like lending, staking, and stable coins come into play? If someone "gives" you an altcoin (for staking or lending), is that considered capital gains or income? How do you value the "altcoin"?

If you just buy crypto coins with dollars, hold, and later sell, it's treated the same way as a stock. But if you get paid in BitCoin for services rendered, or you trade one coin for another, that's a taxable event. It's complicated and you probably need a tax expert to do it right (I certainly don't qualify).

Short answer is that it doesn't. Form 8949 has zero support.

I hope it is written in a pure functional language, because this seems like the perfect application for it.

It's written in C. You can see the code here: https://sourceforge.net/p/opentaxsolver/SrcCodeRepo/HEAD/tre...

My gosh, all the red flags go up for me. Non SSL page, sourcefourge, yahoo email contact address. UI from a really long time ago? Then I see it was made in 2003, ahhhh ok, makes sense -- and now I'm really impressed. They have updated it every year since 2003!!

Does it calculate or solve?

Cool I always make errors when I do my taxes by hand.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com