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Comment by zallarak | Hacker News Reader

I helped make Truffle. Here to answer any questions and thanks for stopping by!

What's the basis for "the average freelancer finds $12,931 of business deductions"? That sounds mighty generous; I'd like to hear how that breaks down. Do people really spend thousands on flights and hotels and then forget about them?

The wording is "finds $12,931", not "finds $12,931 * more*".

Don't people normally just use separate credit cards / bank accounts for business vs personal expenses?

> Don't people normally just use separate credit cards / bank accounts for business vs personal expenses?

Every year my accountant tells me to do this. And every year I lose cards and get distracted by promos.

right I have two cards, but hey I misplaced one card whatever am I to do with this necessary expense right now?!

Yeah, that's what I do.

My personal card has much better travel rewards and free travel insurance, so I use my personal card for travel. Then I have to remember to deduct it at the end of the year. Usually it's not too hard to find the travel though.

I'll still be signing up for this just to see how it does.

Can you speak a bit more to the privacy policy? If I import my data, pay you $40, print out my report and then say “delete,” will you delete everything?

What do you want to hear more about? Glad to answer any questions.

He asked a pretty specific question.

Sorry. The answer is yes, we will delete everything.

I skimmed the question and answered in haste. My apologies.

Yes. We will delete everything.

You mention that you use the Plaid API to get the transaction data. You might delete _your_ copy of the user's transactions, but won't the user's transactions still exist somewhere at Plaid?

It feels very dishonest to say that you delete the user's data, while handing it over to a third-party ...

Plaid is really just a centralized API layer for all the different bank accounts and bank systems which all have different specifications and data formats. Plaid just makes it easy for to get it in a clean JSON response. They don't store the transaction data themselves, they're just a middleman.

How do you know that?

I work at a company that is one of Plaid's largest customers and have chatted with their engineers before at a meetup in San Francisco. They were very open that they store the data themselves, and even shared this blog post with me about how they poll for data: https://blog.plaid.com/distributed-duplicate-detective/.

For what it's worth, I actually like Plaid's API compared to Yodlee, but have serious concerns about privacy. There's no way to determine if they are _just_ collecting transactions when you request the user's transactions as a dev. The user is handing over their user/pass/MFA and Plaid could be doing god knows what with that.

Can you prove it?

> Can you prove it?

Beyond audit by a third party, how would one go about proving they deleted something and absolutely no other copy remains?

I expect it doesn’t work in non-US countries, correct?

Any plans to expand to other countries? I know it’s hard, tax is a different mess everywhere, but I could really use it here in UK...

Would you ever open it up to past years? I would love to go back to see if I missed anything in a past year. I could then maybe refile and get back some money.

I’ve wondered when someone would do this. Great idea

How does it work?

Thanks for your kind words. I love your writings.

Connect your personal spending accounts, and we'll find all potential business deductions and categorize them for you.

If something isn't actually a deduction / business-related, you may remove it. If we got a categorization wrong, you can fix it.

How does it know what’s business related?

It is maximally inclusive. It is up to you to remove what is not.

I know that doesn't cover all use-cases, but it is what we started out with.

this is the best way to do it IMO. algorithms aren't as smart as me at everything. they're going to miss some things. even facebook with all their resources still can't figure out an algorithm that actually shows me posts from all the people that I want to see. And honestly it's easy enough for me to go through a list of potentially business-related expenses and say "nope, not business-related".

Facebook does that intentionally, the more you spend scrolling through crap with the occasional thing you actually want to see the more time you'll be looking at advertisements. They don't make money by being more useful, they just make money from showing you ads.

Presumably the same reason for the recent reddit redesign, and snapchat's awful UI changes.

what I mean is that there are some friends that I never see posts from, even though I want to. Ads aside. Facebook will never show me posts from some people that I'm facebook friends with. I could have 500 facebook friends that I want to see posts from, and even though I view thousands of ads I'll only ever see posts from the same 100 people.

Would I gain any benefit from Truffle by connecting my business account instead of my personal account? I already keep all my business expenses separated. Isn't that what other freelancers typically do?

There's a lot of classes of people that can be considered "freelancer" in this context, from those who basically run as a 1-person agency to someone who just picks up a 3-month contract instead of a permanent role

Not all of those classes will have or even need a full business separation setup

Try it and let us know!

Is this powered by Plaid? What's the user experience when you can't pull a full year+ of transactions?

Instead of exporting to Excel, will you support exporting to TurboTax?

We will look into that. If it’s not some arcane format we will get it done ASAP.

It used to be a very arcane format but I haven't looked at it in quite a few years.

Is that just for the sake of having it alongside your other financial info for the year? I thought the tax filing itself just needed the total

Well yes and no. On the actual tax form you just put a total, but TurboTax asks you to break it down, one so that you get it right, and two because if you get audited you have to provide broken down info, so you can't use their audit defense product unless you break it down.

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