Show HN: Taxaroo – professional tax preparation without leaving your house
taxaroo.comHey, HN! Long-time fan, infrequent contributor here.
My co-founder and I are excited to share with you our startup - Taxaroo. At the risk of sounding cheesy, think of Taxaroo as "Uber", but for tax preparation. Taxaroo is a marketplace that matches tax filers with professional tax preparers entirely online. We offer up-front, fixed-price quotes based on clients' unique tax situation, and match them with experienced tax preparers that are able to handle that specific scenario. Clients pay no additional fees to us - we only charge tax preparers a referral fee.
Beyond simply a marketplace, Taxaroo is also a convenient (and secure) platform for you, as a client, to exchange documents and basic personal information with your preparer (rather than emails, lugging stuff to someone's office, or [shudder] faxing docs). We also enable you to pay with a credit card and only be charged once you've approved your final tax return(s).
Though we've been working on this for nearly a year, we only recently opened up the platform for tax preparers and have already received a strong response and lots of enthusiasm. We have signed up professionals from across the U.S. with an average experience of over 17 years preparing taxes. We rigorously validate several levels of identification and credentials, and verify these with the IRS.
We'd love for you to check it out and let us know what you all think! If you're getting ready for tax season, we want to offer HN a 10% discount for the first 25 people using this promo link: https://taxaroo.com/getstarted/LOVE4HN.
Thanks,
Tim (Co-founder and CTO, Taxaroo)
This is great, I was doing my tax the other day and thinking "Why the f* don't they make it a web form with simple English terms".
Tiny suggestion: Add a page saying which countries it's available for. Since it had a 'roo' I and ~25M Australian will hope it supports Australia. t was obvious once I started the form but first I look for an about or faq page.
Hey, thanks for the suggestion! Unfortunately, since we're U.S. based we weren't comfortable branching outside the U.S. just yet (since we aren't sure of the laws in other countries in this area). I hope we can support other countries in the future!
This is awesome! Love the idea and a great team leading the execution!
Do you match preparers by state/local?
Hey! We do based on state. When you receive a quote, it includes all states you've lived or work. We then match you with preparers who indicate that they can handle returns for those states. By agreeing to do these states, they are in turn agreeing to handle local returns as needed. However, if you end up having any specific concerns you can freely discuss with your preparer (or us) and we can address them.
These guys are great! Glad to see this launch.