

Show HN: Prepare your Income Tax Return with a Form-16 upload - architgupta
https://cleartax.in/paytax/UploadForm16

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patio11
_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."

~~~
architgupta
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.

~~~
guan
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.

~~~
architgupta
Yes, good idea.

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architgupta
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>

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

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

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

<http://cleartax.in/Meta/FreeIncomeTaxReturnFiling>

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

~~~
architgupta
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

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seshagiric
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.

~~~
architgupta
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.

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vardhanw
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.

~~~
sigkill
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.

~~~
something876
_Looks up whois info:_

Registrant Name:Gupta

Registrant Street1:C block Vikaspuri

Registrant Phone:+091.1111111111

It looks... scammy.

~~~
architgupta
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.

~~~
something876
That footer with the About Us link needs to be on _every_ single page of your
website.

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pyUser
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.

~~~
architgupta
Here's a link:

<http://cleartax.in/Meta/Privacy>

Our privacy policy is linked from the home page.

~~~
pyUser
Great! Good luck Archit. Good work.

~~~
architgupta
Thank you. Appreciate it :)

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

~~~
architgupta
Thank you. I'll fix this :)

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wesley
Would be nice to test with a sample PDF.

~~~
architgupta
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)

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

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

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

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

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gus_massa
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.

~~~
architgupta
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.

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evolve2k
So a Form 16 is an employee end of year payment summary from an employer?

~~~
architgupta
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.

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

~~~
architgupta
Thank you for the kind words. :)

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yashchandra
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'_

~~~
architgupta
:-)

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

