The year for your tax office

A year is finished when it can leave Taxinger: as the lines of your country's form, as a document for the office that is the statement behind them, as a spreadsheet you can work in, and, where the authority publishes a format, as the file that authority reads by machine.

The form's lines

A year is stored as the lines of the form it goes on, in the year's own version of that form: each value with the field it belongs to, named as the authority names it (a Zeile or Kennzahl, a poz.), in the year's currency.

A line that comes to nothing for you is still shown with its field, so the return you file can be read against this page field by field.

The document (PDF)

The document is written in the authority's language, from that country's own words: the figures by their form lines, the item lists the authority asks to see (Germany's separate statement of disposals, for instance), the method used, and what the totals leave out.

While items are still waiting on an answer, the document is marked a draft and says how many items there are and the amount they affect. It is not the official form filled in: it is the statement behind the numbers you or your advisor put on that form.

The spreadsheet (XLSX)

One sheet per table behind the year: the form's lines, your sales with their cost and the day acquired, your income, whatever was booked as revenue or cost, and what was left out with its reason, in your own language, built in your browser.

The declaration file

This is the one artefact a tax office reads by machine, so it is produced to the format the authority itself publishes, never to a vendor's: Spain's record designs, Austria's annual-return structures, Poland's e-Deklaracje, Italy's technical specifications, Portugal's file format. Germany publishes no such format for this return, so a German year has no file to download.

Each year's version says what the file is and is not before you download it: one country's file is a whole single-person return stating no other income, another's is one block of a larger form. At the download, we say what your year's totals still leave out.

What a format needs and Taxinger does not hold (your number at your authority, and whatever else that structure demands of a taxpayer) is asked in a form at the download and never stored, from what that country and year declare. Where the structure allows only a closed list of values, you pick from exactly that list.

The file is part of a paid plan, from the cheapest one up. Where a country or a year has no published format, there is no download to offer.

Filing, and saying you filed

Taxinger files nothing: nothing is transmitted to an office, and who carries the year there is you or the person who does your taxes.

When it is done, you can mark the year as filed. That mark is your own word about it: it computes nothing again, locks nothing, and survives every recalculation, so a year you already filed is never again one you have to remember the state of.