Show HN: Prepare your Income Tax Return with a Form-16 upload | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Prepare your Income Tax Return with a Form-16 upload

cleartax.in

57 pointsarchitgupta40 comments

Specify date in format like 25/3/1987

Users will routinely ignore or misinterpret instructions like this. It takes an extra hour or two of work, but either do the three dropdown boxes or give them a free-form text field which is fairly intelligent with a suggestion that tells them how to phrase things and then attempts to discern their intent when they write things in a way which is not ambiguous.

For example, 3/25/1982 and 25/3/1982 and 1982 Mar 25 are all trivially recognizable and unambiguous. Should someone type in 3 4 82, two hours of work will let you say "We really care about your tax return being accurate so we want to check: is your birth date [March 4th, 1982], [April 3rd, 1982] or [something else?]"

You would additionally benefit from microcopy on this page to the general effect of "Your data is totally secure -- we use bank grade encryption [and blah blah blah]. You can review your return before we send it to the tax authorities."

Thank you for the feedback. :-)

You are absolutely correct about users ignoring and mis-interpreting instructions, we constantly struggle with this. The suggestion is very good.

I find the multi-year-dropdown cumbersome, but maybe it is more functional and there's less probability of a mistake! One minor thing I'd like to add is users in India typically write date in the form of DD/mm/YYYY.

Maybe show a calendar with a dropdown select menu for the year?

You could still let people type in the year, as that is less ambiguous, but have dropdowns for day and month. Or just have a dropdown for month.

Yes, good idea.

Or just use a date picker which comes up when the field gets focus.

I think pretty much everyone in Commonwealth countries uses dd/mm/yyyy. We use it in Canada too.

I don't mind putting in the date really. 25/3/1982 seems to be really unambiguous and clear - well a date control could be added, but I don't think it is needed.

I have questions on passwords though. What's the reason you made this? Also what could be the worst case in sharing the password with an unknown website?

In India, a Form-16 is like a W-2 in the US.

We have tried to make tax filing simpler for users, where they can upload the form-16 and get 90% done with their tax return preparation.

Here's a sample Form-16 explained: http://cleartax.in/Guide/understandingform16

Hi Archit, its a very nice app for all Indian Tax payers.btw, Including social Media would be helpful in spreading the word fast.

Aah thanks! Makes sense. I'll add some share buttons.

For women, there is an offer of free tax filing (till June 28th)

http://cleartax.in/Meta/FreeIncomeTaxReturnFiling

I find this tax-site-as-dating-opportunity pretty hilarious. Please tell me Mr. Bose is real, because I want him to be real!

Based very loosely on a friend of mine :-)

So glad you liked it! It is rare that people read it ;)

http://cleartax.in/meta/love is the story

Do you have plans to mine the salary data? you will have access(though only system based, not human) to large chunk of salary information which you can mine to build either user profiles (e.g. identify people with good disposable income, who is paying how much for insurance, number of people submitting medical expenses) etc.

There is an automatic feature which the user can run which shows certain tax deductions which he/she missed out on. We are going to turn this feature on soon.

We don't do advertising to our users. TurboTax in the US is a good bellwether - they have been super ethical and never use data to advertise or sell user information. We have similar privacy policies and very high regard for customer trust.

One concern would be about the confidentiality of the data. You say it is govt approved, but perhaps you can add some explanation/commitment that there will not be any compromise with the data which is very important for the users.

This is true. They have practically everything on you right from your full name to company you work for, to PAN card info and your salary and investments.

Even if I trust _you_ how sure can I be that you won't get hacked. May we ask you how good is your security? Do you store anything? Encrypted? More details would be awesome.

I'm the security nerd in my group, and if it passes my eyes, I'll DEFINITELY recommend this to everyone I know.

Looks up whois info:

Registrant Name:Gupta

Registrant Street1:C block Vikaspuri

Registrant Phone:+091.1111111111

It looks... scammy.

I didn't update our company's information with the domain registrar.

You can take a look at the "About Us" and the "Contact Us" page. We mention about our company's name and the physical address of the headquarters.

Our company's details can be verified easily at the MCA (ministry of company affairs) website.

That footer with the About Us link needs to be on every single page of your website.

What is your privacy policy? Couldn't find on your site. That's a ton of data you will have which is worth a lot of money if sold raw/processed. Somebody already asked you about security of data, so am not bringing that up.

Here's a link:

http://cleartax.in/Meta/Privacy

Our privacy policy is linked from the home page.

Great! Good luck Archit. Good work.

Thank you. Appreciate it :)

There's a typo in https://cleartax.in/Guide/GoldService - it says "One complementary Digital Signatures included."

Thank you. I'll fix this :)

Would be nice to test with a sample PDF.

Here is a sample Form-16 explained:

http://cleartax.in/Guide/understandingform16

(Its not a sample PDF unfortunately, but it shows what a typical Form-16 looks like)

Great app, can you please tell me what technology you are using and your hosting company? Thanks

We run on .NET - most code is written in C#.

Hosting wise we run on Appharbor, which is kind of like heroku for .NET.

Thanks. I did not know about AppHarbor, I will look it up.

In IE8 (WinXP) I get an error in the certificate (CN = *.apphb.com), but the page looks fine.

In IE9 I don't get any error, but the page look horrible (don't use the css?).

In Chrome it works without problems.

We use SNI SSL certificate (running on appharbor). On Windows XP and IE-8, there are issues with certificate detection. (There's no issue with the actual transport layer security - All data transmission is over SSL. In case you are interested in the details: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Server_Name_Indication )

I am looking into the IE-9 issue. I wasn't able to reproduce on the Windows XP SP3 machine I have with me.

So a Form 16 is an employee end of year payment summary from an employer?

Yes, its more like a tax document issued by employer at the end of the year.

- It talks about the Salary + perks + allowances the employer gave the employee.

- It mentions the Tax Deducted at source by the employer for depositing to the government.

This is great app, keep up. Will use this :)

Thank you for the kind words. :)

Love the UI. Very clean design.

Note some bugs. I entered a bad URL (https://cleartax.in/badURL) and got this error: Server Error in '/' Application. The IControllerFactory 'AT.Web2.Infrastructure.NinjectControllerFactory' did not return a controller for the name 'badURL'. Description: An unhandled exception occurred during the execution of the current web request. Please review the stack trace for more information about the error and where it originated in the code. Exception Details: System.InvalidOperationException: The IControllerFactory 'AT.Web2.Infrastructure.NinjectControllerFactory' did not return a controller for the name 'badURL'

:-)

Thank you for the feedback. We need to serve a better 404 page. We'll do this shortly.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com