[PLUG] ITR filing w/o proprietary s/w

[Siddhesh Poyarekar]

On Sat, Aug 27, 2011 at 11:57 AM, Mayuresh <mayuresh at acm.org> wrote:
> Let's try to deal with it technically. What would it take to create the
> "xml" that one has to finally upload be prepared by hand? Its schema is
> available. What needs to be extracted from their Excel is some
> auto-computed fields' rules and some validation rules. Is it possible to
> reliably extract the macros from Excel forms and mimic them into an
> offline utility?
>
> Has anyone tried anything like that. (Salute to you if you have.)
>

I have been hand-editing the returns xml for my IT returns. The xml
tags are fairly well-named and I had considered writing a little tool
to do this, but I don't really know the structure of all the forms to
do this correctly at all. Heck, I won't even claim to know the ITR-2
that well despite having used it for 3 years now -- I have had to file
for rectification requests for most of my returns till date.
Thankfully the IT department has been pretty accommodating of my
goof-ups.

And it would be too much to expect some single person to write apps
for all forms when (s)he uses only one -- most free software gets
written based on the scratch-your-itch basis. It would be a better
idea to set up a page somewhere that collects everyone's efforts.

-- 
Siddhesh Poyarekar
http://siddhesh.in