eTRACS - Electronic Tax Revenue Assessment and Collection System is an intelligent software application that enables government sectors to efficiently and accurately manage and monitor collection of taxes and allows fast exchange of data from one sector to another. Unlike TRACS, eTRACS now accommodates unlimited number of users, unlimited amount of data, supports wider coverage extending to provinces and runs on any operating system.

The project is divided into three (3) inter-related modules, namely: Registration Module, Tax Collection Module, Real Property Tax Collection Module and Business Permit Module emloying the concept of the Rule Engine; an expert system which performs the most essential part of the program - smart decision making. TRACS users only need to input required information and the program will automatically compute for the entity's taxes basing on its city's existing revenue code.

If your budget is really tight, you can start with a core 2 duo desktop computer with at least 2GB of physical memory. However, if your budget can afford an entry level server machine, we highly recommend to have it instead of a desktop computer.

eTRACS community version is free software. Any LGU interested can avail the product without charge. The current version and codes are maintained by Rameses Systems Inc. A section in this website is still being developed where the software can be downloaded. In the meantime, you can contact us for more information.

Normally marketing and sales drive the price of software up. In reality, it has been known that most companies practice under the table transactions or make bribes to win the bid which bloats the price of the software to skyhigh prices. The following are reasons on why we decided to give this software away for free.

1. To eliminate or lessen any opportunity of corruption in the LGU by not selling the software.
2. Allow any LGU, large or small to avail best of breed technology.
3. More LGUs implementing the project, means more people submitting bugs and other implementation issues. This will all contribute to making a better product.

The initial project was funded and already paid for by AusAid. However, the continuation of development is shouldered by us. To sustain this, we rely on professional fees for on site installation and training if an LGU wishes to contract our services. We also provide regular trainings on how to use eTRACS, and how to develop applications on top of it. For more information regarding our professional fees and other services, contact us.

It depends. Normally an enterprise software like these takes a lot of experience to develop. A project like eTRACS is very complex and requires several implementations first to really perfect the system. An implementation in one LGU cannot be fully applied to another because of different practices. The right technology also matters. The main advantage using open source is the availability of full range of great technologies that are also free to use. For example, eTRACS includes a rule engine, a workflow engine, a J2EE server, enterprise clustering, etc. which is possible for us to integrate because the projects we use are also open source. So in effect, the commercial counterpart of a product in the same caliber of eTRACS would have to be very, very, very expensive.

eTRACS was basically designed to handle real time payment of properties in the province. We have not opted for a centralized database because it will present many problems. Imagine if there is no connection, then municipalities wont be able to do their day to day transactions. Having a centralized database looks good only on paper but is a project doomed to fail in this situation. Instead we opted for another strategy based on distributed programming. Municipality databases are decentralized but connected to the province. When a taxpayer pays in the province, the province broadcasts the information to all connected municipalities. The municipalities that has properties of the taxpayer reports the result to the province. After payment, the province again broadcasts the payment so the municipality can update the appropriate ledgers.

Wrong. eTRACS is not browser-based application but it connects to the server using internet protocols. This means if you have an eTRACS client, you can connect to the server even if the server is located in the US, Europe or anywhere across the globe. The reason we are not using browser-based applications is because browsers are very slow when connected in remote areas where the internet connection is limited like a dial-up. Although this will change in the future, a browser-based application does not scale well in the present situation. Right now, there are still a lot of municipalities that cannot connect or have very limited connectivity. eTRACS right now, can work fairly well in this situation because a lot of the processing is offloaded to the client. eTRACS was designed to optimally work in heavy transactional applications even if the connectivity is poor.

Yes. In programming there is always a trade-off. Not installing a program is the main advantage of browser-based applications. But the advantage stops there. eTRACS is targetted for heavy mission critical applications where security, scalability, reliability and speed is important. Based on experience, a web-based application is great for simple transactions. It does not scale well for heavy transactions and there are alot of problem areas because it is very difficult to fully control the browser. Imagine a web page hanging in the middle of a payment transaction.It is great however for some solutions like if a taxpayer wants to view his billing statement. eTRACS has an application layer for web-based applications but it will mostly be for queries, reports, or non-critical transactions. eTRACS does come with a tight versioning control and automatic update center to ease maintenace.

eTRACS follows the J2EE specifications and that means you will not be tied up to any database vendor. The default database that comes with eTRACS is MySQL because it is free. But you can definitley change this to whatever database you want. All you need is the driver for that database, a mapping instruction and some configuration settings. There will be no more recoding of the application needed. If the configuration is correct, it will magically use your database immediately. Check on our wiki for supported databases.

No. Part of the target design for eTRACS is the ability to use any programming language to communicate with it. eTRACS was programmed using java but you do not need to learn java to write applications on it. We will design trainings on how to use different kinds of technologies for eTRACS, that means you can put all your skills to use whether you are a PHP, Ruby, Dotnet or a Visual basic programmer.

Be a part of the community and contribute your knowledge. You can learn a lot by teaching others. You can join our forums, blogs or contribute how-tos in our wikis whether you are a programmer, an administrator, an eTRACS user or you just want to learn. If you are a good speaker or a developer, we can even invite you to become a paid trainer or professional. So there are also opportunities in it.