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Comment by deepGem | Hacker News Reader

To be honest, the Indian government's e-filing site is good enough for a vast majority of tax payers. The interface is simple and fast. If you have a digital signature there is no need to mail any hard copies of any documents.

Meanwhile, ClearTax is really helpful if your returns are complicated. You have 3 houses, own stocks and a business etc. If you sign up for their gold package, a dedicated CA will assist you in all your returns and is available throughout the year over phone or email.

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Mine was this use case, had stocks, had rented house, had some income from interest. While it took something like 45 minutes to file but they some how helped me save me rs. 4000 in their calculation and I had to pay nothing and that was cool. I wish if anyone could come up similar for small business accounting and tax then my startup dream will be realised product is ready but process of setting up company seem to be very difficult

Why anyone else :). I'll be surprised if a small business accounting offering isn't on ClearTax's product roadmap. It's high time companies like eLagaan got killed - they are just ripping customers off. To obtain a company PAN - they are charging 1000 INR which costs 100 INR if you apply online.

This year they have come up with something called netbanking verification. With that you don't have to mail any documents even if you don't have digital signature. If I remember correctly, there are other means of verification in addition to netbanking.

They just sent me an OTP on my phone. Thats it. Verification done. Then, as you mention, people can also log in to their net banking portal and verify, since the account would be linked to your PAN card. So in conclusion, most people should not need to send any hard copy at all.

I took up a job outside India this year, and lost my India number. Now I just can't use the netbanking verification. I still haven't mailed the documents :/

You need to convert your accounts (legally required once attaining NRI status) to NRO/NRE status and then you will receive OTP on your email. This is the case atleast with ICICI.

Previously had to close the resident account and then open new NRO/NRE accounts. But now it seems just changing the status of your old accounts and it retains the old numbers.

And I dont think their services are that good also , I was assigned a CA but got no response from them even after 3-4 messages and mails sent . I was frustrated to the point that I stopped caring and got one locally .

Hi nautical,

I am Archit Gupta, co-founder at ClearTax, can you please shoot me an email archit@cleartax.in, I'll investigate immediately.

These days you do not need to have any digital signature, you can verify your return via email or SMS

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