| Auto-generating a tax return is one thing. Taking advantage of all your potential tax benefits and considering your edge cases is another thing. I've seen tax returns for many of inDinero's customers, and it's clear to me that their previous accountants took shortcuts in compiling the return. Yes, it'll get filed. But there were probably more tax advantageous things they could have / should have done. Consider these examples: 1 - tax credits. How is the government supposed to automatically know that you're paying for child care? How are they to know that you just installed solar panels on your roof or that you just purchased an electric vehicle? Sure, they can make this "automatic" -- but then you'd still be going out of your way to report your purchase, and this is in no way simpler than the current solution today. 2 - does it make sense to be taxed as a partnership or sole-proprietor? For a lot of our customers, they're basically flushing $20k down the toilet because they didn't want to go through the tiny nuisance of filing as an S-Corporation. Pretty sure you don't want the IRS to dictate your tax treatment. 3 - should you depreciate your Aeron chairs over multiple years, or do accelerated depreciation which will allow you to deduct the entire amount in a single year? The IRS gives us the flexibility to choose, and it's questions like these that may require the help of a tax professional. 4 - deducting vehicle expenses. How is the IRS supposed to figure out how many miles on your car were used for business VS personal purposes? 5 - what part of your apartment was used exclusively for hacking? No way for the IRS to know that the number is 250/1500 square feet. In short, putting together a tax return isn't that hard. The difficult part is hunting down all of this other information that we have no way of just knowing. Instead of asking why robots couldn't be doing our taxes by now, we might rephrase the question to read "how can we do year-round accounting in such a way that taxes are 10X easier to take care of?" |