Over halfway there!
Firstly, thank you to all TaxDrop investors who have helped us reach over 50% in just a week! This quick milestone has fueled our excitement and we look forward to a successful tax season in 2018. Among those who invested so far are:
- Fellow tax preparers
- Frustrated self-prep software users
- Investors who understand how TaxDrop is for everyone
- People who have been filing their taxes since 1954, and those who just started
This is a really exciting time to be in financial services with all the change and innovation happening in fintech. Complicated by ever-changing regulations, tax and accounting is headed for a major makeover.
Future developments
So much money, but most importantly time, is spent on this annual repetitive process that so desperately needs the touch of machine learning. Future developments will include connecting bank accounts to TaxDrop, so expenses can be auto-populated into tax software. With Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology, key numbers may be auto-extracted from scanned tax documents and populated into the tax software, making TaxDrop scalable.
With billions being spent on data entry alone, TaxDrop is targeting the massive preparation costs that preparers bill hourly for or are substantially increased by salaried workers hired for data entry. The TaxDrop solution increases the profit gap and relieves accounting talent for value-adding services.
Questions on the SAFE valuation cap vs. TaxDrop valuation
As explained in the discussion thread, there are many reasons for choosing the $8M valuation cap. This is cap does not suggest TaxDrop’s current valuation, which will be determined in the near future. TaxDrop’s proprietary software as it grows will become essential to disrupting the tax industry and may take on a B2B model, licensing the auto-population tool to existing tax firms to reduce costs of tax prep. Such a tool would be equally valued internationally as would be with US preparers—all tax preparers no matter which country face high cost and time burdens of manual data entry and all taxpayers would save time no longer digging for a multitude of receipts and tax documents.
The discussion will appear here.