architgupta

It is great for us. Better APIs, more stability, clear wind behind our backs for a more digitization, more tax payers, more transparency, no middlemen, more things in white.

The Government software isn't very simple to use if you have switched jobs, have HRA to claim, or have more deductions than you have declared to the employer.

Many people miss out on deductions (such as 80TTA) which we automatically account for.

Plus we reduce data entry mistakes, and the other things I pointed out in the original comment.

Archit from ClearTax here. We are working very hard on creating a new product for freelancers and businesses.

Following is for the freelancer / business scenario:

We have to invent the interfaces, the design language, while making sure people can deal with tax concepts and pay appropriate tax. There are difficult concepts like depreciation which need careful handling.

Our freelancer / smb version of taxes will dramatically simplify life for self preparation.

Imagine an ITR-4S equivalent for freelancers which we are creating.

Note that a good CA can help you and come out ahead of software because of the complexity involved. But we hope to make software good enough for the services industry.

By the way, we are the makers of TaxCloudIndia.com which has 10K+ CA firms using our software. We have some of the largest CA firms using our tech. I believe a good CA can offer advisory today which software isn't able to yet.

I'm hoping to fix the "difficult to do" tag for Indian taxes with the efforts of the ClearTax team. That's our mission!

Would love to talk -- archit@cleartax.in :)

:)

Hi,

I am the co-founder of ClearTax http://cleartax.in

We help Indians e-File their Tax Returns.

Addressing some common points in the thread: we work great for both simple and complex tax returns.

For simple tax returns: The huge improvement is zero data entry -- we'll automatically parse your Form-16 and fill out the correct tax form. We'll ask questions relevant to you. We automatically detect corner cases, mistakes, scenarios for notices and flag them for you.

We help in cases where you haven't claimed HRA, have interest income (and claim 80TTA deduction automatically for you!)

There's a lot of tax complications which self filers don't know and the Government software isn't informative and automated enough.

We end up saving taxes because our software does more. :)

Hi nautical,

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

ClearTax has a tax calculator as well :D

https://cleartax.in/paytax/TaxCalculator

Hi Arihant,

I work at ClearTax http://cleartax.in - so I'll add some feedback here.

Many people find the Government tool intimidating and difficult to use. It is hard to figure out which Form to file (there is ITR-1, 2, 3, 4S, 4) and now there's a new tax form (ITR-2A) which muddies the waters further.

ClearTax identifies the correct tax form for you automatically. You upload your Form-16 (W-2 equivalent for India) and our software will automatically read everything and fill out the correct tax form within seconds. We'll take you through a simplified form which will ask basic questions and help you make progress. If you get stuck, our support team answers questions or you can buy CA assistance for complex plans.

The Government form is sufficiently complicated for Income earned from Rent (if you own a house), because it won't give you the 30% deduction (Section 24) in the ITR-1.

If you need to figure out long term or short term capital gains when you sell assets, the Government form is very very difficult to use even for experts (We have 10K+ Chartered Accountants using the professional version of ClearTax).

I truly believe that the level of cognitive complexity in the Government's tool is much higher than ClearTax.

Lakhs of users in India e-File on ClearTax because they find it simpler than the Government's tool.

I do agree that for an expert user, the tools may feel equivalent :)

Regards, Archit

ClearTax (YC S14) is hiring in New Delhi, India. Hiring software engineers -- founders are programmers, engineering first culture.

Drop me an email: archit @ cleartax.in

ClearTax is in the unique position to shape the future of India's financial software. Software and experiences designed by us will determine how Indians e-File, save on their taxes, invest and lead simplified financial lives.

Most financial software in our country is from the 80s and stuck in legacy. Most people today have powerful smartphones in their pockets and their lives are better because of apps like WhatsApp, Google Maps and Evernote.

Simple and intuitive financial tools for taxes, accounting, payroll, invoicing, investing do not exist in our country today. We want to change this.

Our mission is to simplify every Indian's financial life. And we'd like to invite you to join us in this mission.

We use a range of programming languages: Functional programming (F#), Java and C#, Python, Javascript. We are huge fans of brevity in code. We use both SQL and noSQL databases.

You can read more at http://cleartax.in/meta/careers

These are very nice changes. Especially the ability to write a quick lambda for named functions (or functions which are needed often).

The elvis operator is useful to. Makes me think sticking to F# will cause fewer classes of bugs that can happen in C# (the onChanged example is quite interesting).

I'll submit a testimonial - thanks for telling me.

Interesting, we haven't played around with Xamarin studio and F# yet.

We'd be super stoked to be able to target iOS and Android via F# if that happens with .NET getting open sourced!

We use F# for a fairly large production service, and we'll hang around here answering questions if you have any.

Super excited by the Indian Government's focus on e-governance and technology!

Also see http://attendance.gov.in/ -- This is such a beautifully designed website that it blows my mind that the Government designed it!

Our startup ClearTax ( http://cleartax.in ) is made possible by the APIs of the Indian IRS.

The APIs aren't completely open but the registration process is not very onerous. The most interesting aspect is that the Indian IRS is keen on improving the APIs. When we make bug reports, they usually push fixes within 48 hours which is almost unexpected from the Government! Not everything is great but its one of the most advanced tax APIs in the world imo. The bug reporting process is a bit broken, but after the bug was reported they called us back and gave us information about the fix!

I am also deeply optimistic about India's progress in the next decade because of the new PM and the strong focus on development. See also: http://www.makeinindia.com/ a new initiative by the Government to get entrepreneurs building in India.

ClearTax -- cleartax.in uses the .net stack. We use F# and C#.

To Yahoo! India devs, if you got laid off and need help in finding your next gig, please feel free to reach out: I am on archit@cleartax.in

A lot of startups in India are hiring and I would be happy to make intros if you are looking.

In a similar way, we use Kimono for tracking changes to a few sites, which don't have an RSS or an API. I am pleasantly surprised to see Kimono can deal with hairy forum html.

I think our team uses kimono with zapier to trigger an email alert (similar to the OP using twilio to alert himself).

I'm really happy with Kimono!

Hi,

I am the co-founder of ClearTax. Happy to answer questions here!

I don't understand why the top comments are so negative. Product Hunt is an exceptional startup which has a great fresh perspective for discovering new products and a community of people around this.

Its early days for Product Hunt and while specific criticism is great (X should be improved because a, b and c. I think you guys could try m, n or o), the general whining is in poor form. Almost peanut gallery level. We are better than this in HN :)

Product Hunt lets builders like us get a few "non-cynical" eyeballs. Look at the examples he mentions, what's not to love:

<quoting Ryan>

- Notifyr (http://www.producthunt.com/posts/notifyr) was made by a 17 year old in the Netherlands. It's the 5th most upvoted product right now

- Instanerd (http://www.producthunt.com/posts/instanerd) was made by Alex in Skopje, Macedonia as a small side project. It received over 160 upvotes and ~5x the number of comments than the average submission.

</end quote>

Things which may help, in no particular order:

Play a sport you like, work on a project you enjoy (hack on something small and put it out in the world), make a few good friends and maybe work with them (not easy but worthwhile), remain intellectually honest (write down your thoughts / emotions).

Its a cliche to say it, but the gap is creation vs consumption.

The speaker line up looks amazing.

A few reasons: Houses are perceived as good stores of values as prices in the Bay Area generally trend upwards. There is more trust in a house vs the stock market (or the investor has a diversified position and real estate is part of that diversification). Cash sitting in a bank is getting devalued with inflation. Real estate can also generate rent if you don't reside there.

Another angle, the house may be owned in another person's name, then the illiquidity is an advantage. The other person who you trust, may still be tempted to use tiny bits of large chunk of cash if its sitting in a bank account. Meanwhile selling a house is a pretty big deal.

The reason for not keeping the house in your name are possibly related to avoid the local government's oversight into your assets, etc.

I really love using Weebly for helping friends and family who are non-technical.

Getting a basic website up is simple. To contrast I tried other website builders and weebly was the most functional and intuitive for me.

Great job David and team!

You could probably compare kids in the developing world versus kids in the developed world.

Mast.

What do you guys recommend for health insurance as a freelancer? (Short term and medium term visit)

Do you do OCR for text extraction?

I am from a "business" family in India: This means, most of my relatives run small and large businesses. Risk and entrepreneurship is considered normal and a desirable thing to do. Due to this I know a lot of types of businesses and get access to data of their revenues and profitability.

The most profitable businesses I have seen built in the past 5 years, are brick and mortar, infrastructure and real estate businesses. These are not VC funded, or typical for the HN crowd. These are very offline businesses, built on angel capital (friends and family), then institutional bank loans and then directly public money via small IPOs at the best outliers.

A few of these businesses make $100MN+ revenues and the scenarios in which they reached here, was the Government + private contractor nexus. Privileged access to information and contracts is the only case where I have seen hockey stick growths of revenue in India. Most of the profitability comes from "cutting corners".

These businessmen/women stay off the public radar, typically run massively profitable businesses.

Most of them wouldn't consider going to a VC. Private Equity, sometimes yes.

So, in view, its a great time to be in India and to build infrastructure projects, brick and mortar things. A "relationship" with the Government officials is almost a necessary condition to get the contracts. I don't know how honest you can remain in this business, but I have seen so many examples of real startup like hockey stick growth. Hustlers is the word I can think of people who succeed in this type of environment.

Reminds me of a dilbert comic:

http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/2011-02-12/

I enjoyed reading "Rainbows End" by Vernor Vinge. Its exploration of evolution of wearable devices is something I enjoyed a lot.

I read the use case mentioned on the article, wikipedia on mixins and a couple of more articles, I didn't follow what is the use case for mixins?

Someone care to take a stab at it or point to a resource?