MyTaxPro is a UT (Unstructured Time) project started by me and 2 coworkers three years ago after participating in a one-week 'internship' with a tax preparation firm to get a better understanding of how they operated day-to-day, and where there might be opportunities for Intuit and APD to help them. This week of 'walking in the customer shows revealed a problem that interviewing customers never would have revealed.
We ran numerous lean experiments to assess customer interest and to refine the solutions until it solved one big problem very well. Using a PhoneGap application and a QuickBase with no HTML front-end we tested and validated the concept.
The Problem
The process for tax preparers and their clients to share sensitive personal information is still primarily run through desktop software on the tax preparer's end, and through snail-mail or in-person delivery on the client's end. This is a tremendous inefficiency in the age of cloud and mobile technology.
On the tax preparer's end, it causes them to spend up to 30% of their time on the non-billable task of communicating to clients what documents they need, and nagging them repeatedly to provide documents when they don't receive them in a timely manner.
On the client's end, it forces them to manage the list of documents their preparer needs, save the documents somewhere as they receive them, then package them all and send them in the mail or take the time to drop them off in person. Or they scan and send them through email or an online file-sharing service like Dropbox. Scanning is too technical for many users, however, and it the process is still slow and cumbersome.
From an organizational standpoint, the Intuit business unit I was part of has very few mobile offerings, so there was no production platform for our whitespace team to leverage. Also this was not a funded project so there was no defined team or resources.
On the tax preparer's end, it causes them to spend up to 30% of their time on the non-billable task of communicating to clients what documents they need, and nagging them repeatedly to provide documents when they don't receive them in a timely manner.
On the client's end, it forces them to manage the list of documents their preparer needs, save the documents somewhere as they receive them, then package them all and send them in the mail or take the time to drop them off in person. Or they scan and send them through email or an online file-sharing service like Dropbox. Scanning is too technical for many users, however, and it the process is still slow and cumbersome.
From an organizational standpoint, the Intuit business unit I was part of has very few mobile offerings, so there was no production platform for our whitespace team to leverage. Also this was not a funded project so there was no defined team or resources.
The Solution
A mobile/web ecosystem for clients and tax preparers to exchange tax-related documents, and eventually non-document based information as well. This was an unstructured time project being driven by 3 people (including me) joined only by the belief that this is an important problem for our Intuit's division to solve in order to significantly improve the lives of our accounting/tax preparation customers and their small business clients.
