MY ROLE
PLATFORMS
YEAR
When the IRS tells you that you owe a lot of money it can be a panic inducing moment. You probably wouldn’t expect this, but when you call your accountant to tell them about the notice, it can be a nerve-wracking experience for them too. There are dozens of types of notices that change every year and some of the steps to resolve the issue can be complicated.
Large tax firms often have somebody who specializes in tax resolution, but small to mid-size tax firms often either refuse the work or spend so much time figuring it out that it’s not profitable.
Opportunity
Risk
This was a very specialized branch of accounting, would we be able to make the process simple enough that it could replace having a tax resolution specialist on your team?
If we were going to build a product for tax resolution we needed to understand how it worked, fortunately we had an in-house SME who had experience with tax resolution. Over multiple sessions I had him teach us the ins and outs of tax resolution. It was like learning a new language, but by the end we felt reasonably confident that we could come up with a winning solution, with the exception of one crucial point.
Transcripts. These are the records where the IRS keeps of all of your tax information. In order to resolve the tax issues you’ve got to get the transcript. In order to get the transcript you need to get a power of attorney from your client and then request the information on the IRS’s outdated website.
It's sad, but the IRS’s free website is so horrific that I would pay to buy a better alternative.
This was the key that would really make our product valuable, without it we were dead in the water. Fortunately we had some incredible engineers on our team, the IRS didn’t have an API at the time, but the engineers figured out a way to scrape all of that data from the IRS (legally) and show all of it with only a fraction of the effort.
We were in a good place, now all we needed to do was to build an entire task management system that could handle files, notes, subtasks, and status changes. No biggie.
After reviewing this with some accountants and making some adjustments based on their feedback, my PM and I locked ourselves in a meeting room for a week and hashed out all of the details on the whiteboard. Eventually we had a solution that I felt confident we could put in front of some accountants for feedback.
I put together a set of low fidelity wireframes and, using InVision (I know, I’m old) I created a clickable prototype that we could test with some practitioners
We found very quickly that there were a few things that we needed to tweak to make this experience a lot more intuitive for these accountants.
One of the biggest things that we needed to change was the step process. There were multiple steps with a lot of functionality and with all of them open at the same time it became overwhelming very quickly.
Using the principle of progressive disclosure I created a drawer system that would expand only a single section at a time, automatically closing any other open sections.
We also discovered during testing that there was additional complexity to the dates.
In addition to due dates we needed to be able to support a whole variety of different dates that needed to be recorded. Date the notice was received, the date all of the documents had been received, the date it was submitted to the IRS.
This made it easier for accountants to review and track their progress. From a legal standpoint this helped the accountants to breathe a lot easier.
We continued to iterate on our designs until we had a high level of confidence in the designs that we were releasing, and our users were chomping at the bit to get their hands on this new tool.
Based on the early feedback that we had received on this project we knew it would make an impact, but we weren't prepared for how much of a change it would make.
Within the first three quarters of release this feature had earned over $1.3 million in ARR
The revenue from this feature accounted for over 7% of the company's ARR for the year.
In 2019 we were awarded the CPA Practice Advisor Tax and Accounting Technology Innovation Award
