pkoullick92

I've gotten some very angry reactions to this of the flavor "WTF you think design doesn't matter" and "this'll never work at a bigger company". I get it, but please hear me out (and read the whole post) :)

:) one man's treasure

+1

Yeah, love that Sam. I'm not much a github user myself but if there's some existing body of best-in-class templates I'd love to be a part of that. For me, it's all about having a quick thing bookmarked that I can just duplicate from.

Yeah, it's weirdly good at things that are "hard" and then bad at things that are "easy"

Yes - that is the right question :) We'll do a followup where we figure this out because I agree that it's relevant. I would guess 95% at most.

Yep, no plugins just yet - we just passed in tax law changes since 2021

Nice

Keeper Tax is very user friendly, but designed for a simpler use-case. It only does expense tracking very well, but it doesn't have income tracking, or invoicing.

Hello HN! I'm the founder of Keeper Tax (keepertax.com) and killing TurboTax is our mission.

We recently raised a large round, and we're hiring engineers, designers, data scientists. Ping me at paul@keepertax.com

Love this product. Very warm feeling getting the "coffee is on the way!" Email every few weeks :)

Scratch that - how do I message you? I don't see an email on your account

Well, we wanted to start with something that directly and clearly puts money in your pocket. Tax write offs are a good one for that - we feel like too many people donate to the IRS.

When it comes to financial advising, there's a lot we can do but it's also trickier to automate.

Fantastic. Sending you an email now.

Great question! Yes :) https://blog.keepertax.com/posts/paper-receipts-are-required...

Us too!

Woohoo! Yeah part of our ethos is to make taxes easier to understand for everyone so we put effort into our content.

We do list out tax write offs for different types of contracting work on the blog as well, but we don't go very deep into personal write offs since it doesn't matter much unless you're part of the 1%.

There's only one way to find out ;)

I Love it! That's great. Even better :)

Correct. We use Plaid to get access to people purchase history and to charge our monthly fee.

Great question! Lots of components here. In short our stance is that 99% of contractors should itemize at least some of their expense write offs.

What about the standard deduction? https://blog.keepertax.com/posts/should-i-still-track-expens...

Mileage vs. actual car expenses: https://blog.keepertax.com/posts/should-i-claim-mileage-or-a...

Word. That sounds right. One of the challenges we've been up against is just figuring where these contractors are actually spending their time. Thanks for the tip.

Actually, yes. We offer it as a pilot for folks who really want it and are willing to put up with some bugs :) Just text your bookkeeper "HN 2018 tax prep" and we'll set it up for you. It takes 1-2 weeks.

Thank you! Repro'd the localStorage debugging and you're right - we'll clean that up.

Thanks for sharing your story re: 8k on 30k - that's pretty bad :) either you claimed next to nothing in write offs, or you were in a very high tax bracket ... maybe both.

Nice to meet you Rob.

You're right.

Hacker News, go and lock in your sweet time-limited doorbuster 50% discount BEFORE we go and update our prices to $20 per month! :)

Good question! We'd love to do that if there was an easy way to. It would actually just be a portion of all savings due to write offs recorded with Keeper. Savings are calculated using your actual effective tax rate, and other necessary multipliers.

To some extent, yes - the customer is always going to be on the hook for telling the truth. For example, we can ask: did you go out to that dinner with a client or coworker? The customer could lie and say yes, in order to claim more write offs. There's not much we can do about that.

We support users if they get audited in the sense that we'd give them all of their data recorded with Keeper and help answer any questions. Ultimately, we base all of our suggestions on information the user has told us, but we can't guarantee that the answers were truthful.

Thank you for the feedback! We agree. Need to get some semi-professional headshots and approval from our on-staff CPA first, but it's on the shortlist.

I'm curious, why the hard stance on granting purchase data?

Yes we do! Our service is based on US tax law, though. It'll still be helpful from an expense tracking / organization standpoint but keep that in mind :)

Interesting idea!

So basically we'd hold the data hostage ;) I'm curious - why is that's a better model, in your mind?

We support users if they get audited in the sense that we'd give them all of their data recorded with Keeper and help answer any questions. Ultimately, we base all of our suggestions on information the user has told us, but we can't guarantee that the answers were truthful.

I'm curious - what tax software do you use, and what's their audit claim?