Practical Tax Home Page

Practical Tax the Tenforty Project

Welcome to the Practical Tax Home Page.

What is it ?

Practical Tax is an application for Accountants and others returning taxation forms. Currently support is included for the United States Federal Taxation system only. ( Plans are in place to support others )

Tenforty is a standalone version of Practical Tax, being developed specifically for use with the United States Taxation System's form "1040". Project TenForty is Open Source Software and is released under the Gnu General Purpose License. (GPL) Care has been taken to ensure that all stages of the process are transparent and free of licensing limitations or restrictions.

Will it work on my Computer ?

Tenforty is written to run on all common computing Platforms. These include BeOs, Linux, Free-BSD, Win98+, most Mac and OSX systems.

Currently Perl is used as the primary language. If you can install and run a Perl script Tenforty should work on your system. See the Install Pages for further details and links.

Development Status

Tenforty is a new project that is still in active design and development. It does however have a History and working antecedents.. At the moment these and Tenforty are all held under the Umbrella Organization called : LinuxTax.com . A meta-project if you like.

We are always willing to welcome new developers and contributors to this project or any of the others at Linuxtax. Please see the developers pages for information and directions. If you have some experience with any of: Perl, PHP, XML, Postscript or PDF file formats, we are particularly keen to hear from you :)

To monitor major releases and news join the Tenforty-announce mailing list at SourceForge. Drop us a line at the developers or users mailing lists

Details of other contacts, mailing lists, and resources are available on the " Using SourceForge " pages.

The Story so far

Tenforty is the child of a program called Practical Tax which was written by Jay Scherrer and Henry Osokogu . Practical Tax was in turn inspired by a program called PTAX written by Lisa Koch who in her turn was inspired by an application called AmTax .... Such are the ways of Software Development ......

To quote Jay in the Practical Tax Readme:

Why did Lisa Koch start this?

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"In the early 90's, She used a share-ware DOS program called AmTax to help compute her taxes on her 286. AmTax was more sophisticated than PTax, but it did not produce printed output suitable for filing, and it included only a few forms and schedules. Nevertheless, She found it helpful. It was several more years before commercial tax software became a big deal."

"This year, several people She knew who run Linux (including myself) are booting Windows just to use tax software. Her experience with share-ware tax software for DOS (and wanting to learn Perl/Tk), She wrote this program hoping that it will be the start of something similar to AmTax for Linux. We picked up where she left off with Ptax98. Now we have developed not only Ptax2001 for 1040EZ but a complete Professional Tax package "Practical Tax" that not only includes all the schedule s needed but a client database in XML also. Taxes are painful enough without spoiling uptime!"

Jay Scherrer 2001