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Description:

pyrs990 0.1.4

It's a pun. Get it?
A Python application and library that can grab all sorts of IRS Form 990
data on non-profit organizations and put it into a format that can be
consumed easily by other applications.
Up and Running
The instructions below should allow you to get the software working
for your purpose (user or developer). If you run into trouble please,
please let us know so that we can update the instructions (or fix the
bug you ran into).
User
For now you need to clone the repo to use it. Eventually we'll package it.

Make sure you have Python 3.8 available
Install Poetry if you don't already have it
Clone the whole repo, cd into the pyrs990 directory
Install dependencies - poetry install
Run it, some very simple examples are below:

poetry run python -m pyrs990 --zip 59801 --use-disk-cache
...more examples coming soon

Run the commands again, notice the cache speedup
The cache is set to ./.pyrs990-cache/

Developer
This project uses Poetry because it's pretty slick
and does a lot of stuff automatically and the developers are not usually Python
people, so that's great!

Make sure you have Python 3.8 available
Install Poetry if you don't already have it
Clone the whole repo, cd into the pyrs990 directory
Install dependencies - poetry install
If you need to add dependencies:

poetry add coolpkg

Make a pull request!

About the Data
Right now we pull data that originated with the IRS (hence the silly name)
but we get it from a couple sources and information about what is actually
available is a little spread out as well.
Structure
There are two indices used to narrow down the list of filing documents
that must be downloaded a satisfy a given query. The first is an
annual index (we refer to it as "Annual" or "Annual Index" in the
code). This index contains all filings processed by the IRS for a
given calendar year.
Note that this does not necessarily have anything
to do with the filing year. An organization might, for example, file
its 2016 990 in either 2017 or 2018 (or even later). There is a field,
described below, called tax_period that reflects the filing period.
In the future, we intend to further abstract this so that it is
easier to use.
The annual index also contains a field called object_id that tells
us where to find the XML document that corresponds to that row in
the index. PyRS990 abstracts this away, but it is still good to be
aware of it.
The second index is the "Exempt Organizations Business Master File"
distributed by the IRS. We refer to it as the "BMF Index". This
index provides the physical address of each organization, along
with some other helpful information. This allows the data to be
queried by state, zip code, and so on, which greatly reduces the
number of filing documents that must be downloaded for many queries.
Indices may be used to query filing documents from the command
line using various options. Note that there are options for both
indices and for the filing documents themselves. If possible, it
is a good idea to try to use as many index fields as you can to
reduce the number of files you have to download.
See the example queries for more information.
Sources
The IRS BMF index files
are hosted by the IRS directly and are available by state and region.
Descriptions of the variables
contained in the files and the process used to build them are
also available (it is also linked from the page above).
The annual index files come from an
AWS S3 bucket
managed by the IRS. The contents of the bucket are described there.
There is also a readme
that demonstrates how to download the files here (it is also linked
from the page above):
The filing documents themselves also come from this same
AWS S3 bucket
in XML format. For the extremely XML-savvy, you can checked out the
schema documentation
on the IRS website. PyRS990 abstracts this away, however,
so there's no real need to understand it if you only want to access the
data in a convenient format.
Finally, while not strictly a data source, the
IRSx documentation created
by ProPublica contains descriptions of many of the filing fields in a
simple, readable format. For developers, PyRS990 has been designed to
work with the exact XPath selectors listed in the IRSx documentation, so
if you want to add a field to the Filing object, this is the place to
look first.