[thelist] IRS Approval for Tax Preparation Software

Hershel Robinson hershelr at netvision.net.il
Mon Feb 6 14:17:56 CST 2006


I have a client who uses QuickBooks for bookkeeping and for submitting 
US tax forms via electronic filing. I am building an online system for 
him to manage his retail sales--it is not ecommerce precisely, it is 
rather a sales management tool that hooks into his ecommerce site and 
also accepts input of manually-processed sales.

Regarding the IRS tax form submission, I am aware of two options:

1 Export all transactions in a format suitable for import into 
Quickbooks. Then Quickbooks can do the IRS form submission.

2 Perform the IRS form submission via the system I am building.

Number 1 has potential pitfalls (regarding file import to QuickBooks) 
and Number 2 in and of itself is preferable for several reasons, one of 
which simply that saves the user an unnecessary step of switching to 
QuickBooks.

The question thus is how feasible will it be for me to code in my 
PHP/MySQL webapp this IRS tax submission feature. This page outlines how 
this is accomplished:

http://www.irs.gov/efile/article/0,,id=146387,00.html

Does anyone have any experience with this? Are there any insights or 
advice that can be shared?

Regarding Number 1 above, QuickBooks (Intuit that is) itself appears now 
to be moving from file import to its own XML communications interface. 
My guess is that were I to go that route, it will probably prove to be 
on the same level of complexity as the IRS, which means it doesn't 
appear to be a better solution. I don't know for sure, however.

I, by the way, know very little about bookkeeping and even less about 
the IRS.

Thanks,
Hershel



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