Many software professionals in India use this brilliant http://www.ynithya.com/taxcalc/
The above said spreadsheets does not work with open/libre office. If you are looking for openoffice version you can use http://freedom-matters.in/
Show HN: We want to become India's TurboTax. Feedback?
51–60 of 63 posts
Re: Show HN: We want to become India's TurboTax. Feedback?
#52Just curious: how much would I have to pay to get cleartax pro? Also, you might want to fix the Mr Bose example: "ClearTax (an Income Tax website) rode to his resuce". I'm not entirely sure that I consider the story to be a positive endorsement, by the way :) It seems too contrived to be true. Edit: I found out there's a demo video from HN. You might want to make that link a tiny bit more prominent. I love the video,…
We are still arriving at a good pricing model. Right now we charge from $5.5 to $30 for professional CA support. (CA in India is similar to a CPA in the US)
I /hope/ Ayush's PAN info in the video is fake :)
In my opinion, your prices are too low on the higher end. A normal tax return preparer charges something like Rs 250 (negotiable, particularly on bulk deals) to around Rs 500 for a simple ITR-1/ITR-2 return. For people who require audited returns, It would be an order of magnitude more. I take it you don't do those :)
Either way, best of luck!
Re: Show HN: We want to become India's TurboTax. Feedback?
#53I will give you 3 quick points :
1) target NRIs and their tax questions. You will not find any more eager paying customers than NRIs who can get help with their taxes and also help in filing .
Search the forums and you will will hundreds of queries and questions . Leverage those to come with a custom product offering for them
2) Get some Branding : you will need some solid reputation or word of mouth for people to come to you. Explore tie ups.
3) Get some white hackers to test your site. There is nothing more important than convincing people that they can trust you with important financial data.
Have your sites "worked on" thoroughly. :-)
I can give more but not for free ;-)
Pat apinkelefant@gmail.com
Re: Show HN: We want to become India's TurboTax. Feedback?
#54Hello Archit, Fellow Indian Geek here. I must say good job on the site, you have managed to make something that is usable. Here is some of my suggestions: 1) I think you need to get a fancy logo. current one is too plain according to me. 2) You are asking customers some sensitive & yet I do not see "Privacy Policy" which is what stopped me from entering PAN No right at first step1. If its already there, highlight it…
Addressing some other points.
About date: In our user testing, date time format of type DD/MM/YYYY was not obvious to a very layman user. If we gave an example, that translated well for most people. Maybe I should add a date time picker.
Support: Will highlight support method. Good idea.
Goal is not to be just a pretty offering. :-)
I cut everything which contributed to an increase in the download size. Speed and small page size has been my driving focus for the UX. I'll look how to optimize on webfonts usage.
Re: Show HN: We want to become India's TurboTax. Feedback?
#55While it is good that you kept the UI very lean, you would probably benefit from having a UI/UX guy help you with making the app feel a bit more 'dressed up'. Currently this looks like a developer designed it (I should know, I suffer from the same problem). Also, having worked on pretty much the exact same product for the French market, one thing I remember people liked was help sections. By that, I mean big long blo…
My 2 cents, I really liked the UI. Not so much the UX. Have a common footer at the bottom?
Just to get a clearer sense, how does a footer help? I am a design newbie. :)
Re: Show HN: We want to become India's TurboTax. Feedback?
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
We are still arriving at a good pricing model. Right now we charge from $5.5 to $30 for professional CA support. (CA in India is similar to a CPA in the US)
I /hope/ Ayush's PAN info in the video is fake :) In my opinion, your prices are too low on the higher end. A normal tax return preparer charges something like Rs 250 (negotiable, particularly on bulk deals) to around Rs 500 for a simple ITR-1/ITR-2 return. For people who require audited returns, It would be an order of magnitude more. I take it you don't do those :) Either way, best of luck!
Actually we are starting to get requests for higher-end cases.
Lot of people who earn income from business and profession would like a quick, friendly UI to get their taxes done. Its hard to design though :)
We aren't supporting auditing yet. We have to figure that out.
Re: Show HN: We want to become India's TurboTax. Feedback?
#57I like what you are doing here, but you need to be upfront with the pricing before making a user sign up. Having to give up some personal information before even knowing what the product will cost me gives me a negative feeling.
I'll put a pricing page up. I can see how its confusing.
Re: Show HN: We want to become India's TurboTax. Feedback?
#58Two technical things if you are really serious. Localization. Make sure you can support the 22 official languages. And you need a mobile strategy. Mos of your potential users are going to come from. When you consider that brazil had more notebook shipments than India though the population is 1/5th. By my estimation, in India the mobile phone us the Internet.
I don't know what the rules are like in India, but in America you don't have to pay taxes if your income is below a certain amount. I'm guessing that most of the people who don't know English are going to be in that lowest tax bracket.
The rules are similar, and a bit more generous if you're female, or above a certain age. As for the other part of that statement, you'd be surprised at how many people in that bracket can speak English - at least well enough to use a cell phone :)
Re: Show HN: We want to become India's TurboTax. Feedback?
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
You still have to file tax returns. There are many reasons for that. Just to state one, capital gains doesn't come under the ambit of TDS.
Hmmm, I'm not sure what this means, but all you have to do in Greece if you're salaried is to go online and fill the box with the amount of money you made last year. Hardly something you'd need an app for...
It's not just salary which is taxed at source. We have Fixed Deposits which are incurring interest which needs to be declared. We may have made donations which need to be accounted for. Most of us hire a chartered accountant to do the filing. Therefore a software could be of use.
Re: Show HN: We want to become India's TurboTax. Feedback?
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
My 2 cents, I really liked the UI. Not so much the UX. Have a common footer at the bottom?
Just to get a clearer sense, how does a footer help? I am a design newbie. :)
Well, to share my own use case. I clicked the big, "Start your Tax return for free" assuming, it would provide me some information before I joined the site. When it didn't, I looked for the FAQ section at the footer, instinctively, but I didn't find it there. I wanted to know more about the site, before I give you my info. Yet even after creating an account, I need to go back to the home page to look at the FAQ! I hope you are getting what I meant here.