Are You Looking for A Hassle Free Way To File Your Taxes?

Thursday June 14, 2012 , 3 min Read

Filing Taxes is possibly the topmost unwanted task in any professional’s life. One has to pay and on top of it, one has to work hard to pay but it inevitably has to be done. The market is humungous and so is the willingness to adopt. ClearTax, a startup founded by two young techies and grounded by a grey haired tax expert, aims to facilitate this process of filing taxes. There are bigger players in the market but ClearTax sees itself as the *David* in the market.

“We have built this product for people who are not tech-savvy. It is extremely easy to use and anyone who can browse the net, can use the service," says cofounder Anupam Mediratta. Anupam and Archit Gupta, the other cofounder graduated from IIT Guwahati and met again while in Silicon Valley where they struck a chord and decided to start ClearTax. RR Gupta is the third pillar who is a CA by profession and has decades of experience in taxation and accounting. “The way we see this space, taxation is a real problem because majority of people are not able to do their taxes on their own and we're trying to provide a simple solution for that” adds Anupam.

Features:

1. Form-16 auto read: The user just needs to upload the pdf form-16 and the ClearTax system automatically reads the relevant values. This really brings the bar of using a tax-site very low. Because, now you don’t need to know which income value in the form goes where in tax form. And it happens automatically, so it is efficient.

2. Tax Engine:

Complete: Cleartax supplies the same tax engine to various CA firms who do complicated returns. “This means that lot of complex taxation cases have gone through our tax-engine e.g. Salary Arrears, Indexation in Capital Gains, Interest to be paid if you dont deposit advance tax. So, no matter how complex your case is, it is handled like a breeze!” explains Anupam.
Robust: The CA firms file 1000's of returns every year and have been using ClearTax for 2 years.

3. Interface: Highly Categorized and Self Navigational. There are total of 5 steps and at each step you know where you are. And by clicking next or save, you automatically goto next step (or a sub-step).

In their 2 years of existence, Cleartax has mainly delved into B2B engagements wherein they go and demo the product to finance controllers in various companies. “Once they approve, they send an informative email to their employees about ClearTax. We have been getting excellent reception here. Most of the places where we have demo-ed, have approved us.” says Anupam. This is a rather interesting case-in-point as it is a product meant for a B2C model but is ebing driven by B2B engagements.

“Fortunately, people are used to pay for their tax-filing. So, when we charge people for our product, it is not surprising to them.” says Anupam. Cleartax is priced at an affordable Rs 249 for an annual subscription for individuals and the pricing has been arrived upon after a lot of testing. “We want to keep the minimum pricing very affordable as it is a mass consumption product. We are adding a service layer for people who want consultations as well.” says Anupam.

Moving on, personal finance is another related domain in which they are interested. "We see the space as an unsolved problem. We believe once we have a loyal user-base for our tax product, we can build novel products for related domains as well.” informs Anupam as he signs off.

File your taxes with ClearTax here.

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