Tax report as comma file or spreadsheet

I did that for Swedish VAT reports, by just querying the database for the balance (at the end of the period) of a bunch of accounts, adding a few of them together and outputting the appropriate figures inside the appropriate XML tags. (The script also creates a balancing transaction to be imported by the CSV import plugin which I use to import daily sales figures. I'm not familiar enough with the database model to suggest how to do this directly in SQL, but if you have the figures you could always do it manually.)

It's a (very) simple php script sending a ridiculous number of queries to the database. But it only runs once a month...

Something like

select sum(amount) from gl_trans 
where account = $a 
and tran_date => $periodstart 
and tran_date =< $periodend

should get you the data for each account, assuming the VAT accounts were balanced at the start of the period. (I ensure that by booking the balancing transaction on the last day of the period. Otherwise you'd need to sum up all transactions of the account from the start of the year.)

Then you can just output the data into whatever format you need.

I'm afraid I can't help you there. The files output here are perfectly good Excel files. Well... Good enough for LibreOffice, anyway. Can you get anything out of FA in Excel format? Could there be some library missing?

I have just tried an online PDF converting service, and that gets me a nice spreadsheet with the tax data. But it seems a bit odd way to do it, as I know Mysql can export directly to spreadsheet.