Tax Deductions

Ok,

Sigh.

I spent more time tonight on creating receipts like I did last year. I found my ruby scripts that imported and cleaned up the CSV for MySQL that I used last year. This year I knew they switched to UTF-16. In ruby, you just us Iconv to convert this to ASCII, no biggie. But it doesn’t work for some reason on these files.

Ok, Not out of options. I download as Excel and load in LibreOffice. Files loads great. Save as CSV. Works perfectly and is even compatible with my old scripts except this year the columns are a bit different. Not a big deal. I edit my scripts and the DB to match until I realize the excel files that download from the reports page no longer have email or ANY unique data to Key off of other than users paypal name (which doesn’t necessary match any info I have with hive13) FYI, it had this info the month prior…sigh.

This puts us in a bad spot. Without the ability to create reports and email them or at least associate them with the email used in paypal we are SoL. I have data for next year because we setup IPN which hooks into paypal when payments occur and we record this to our own SQL server. This DB has all the info we need. Unfortunately we didn’t have this setup until end of last year. So I have nothing for 2011 that I can create in an automated fashion for the entire group.

So what I will do is if you want a report is if you send me an email then I will do one by hand for you. Next year we will not need to deal with paypals crazy reporting system and can use our own DB to generate receipts.

This is one of those problems with allowing a 3rd party to keep track of your financial records. This has already been addressed for 2012 but not for the 2011 taxes. Let me know off list if you want a report from me to include in your taxes and I’ll create something. Be sure to include whatever your name is in paypal (personal name, wife’s name, company name, etc.)

Regards,

–Craig

I kept track of things myself. I'm good to go. Thankyou very much
for your diligence. I write the hive dues off as a professional fee.

-D

Likewise, I've got cancelled checks and personal records for my
contributions.

Craig, thanks for your efforts but don't burn yourself out. We are a
volunteer group.

If you want to plow ahead to complete a 2011 record and have the data,
I'll offer to help you with the mundane Excel details. That
"technology" is more at my speed.

Jim