Start Up Island. Filing returns made less taxing

As of the middle of last year, more than 1 million people filed their tax returns on ClearTax without having to experience the ‘clunky’ website of the IT Department. Even if it makes up only about 3 per cent of the returns filed (about 34 million filings in all) with the Income Tax Department, it’s no small number. But leaving the description of the government website at ‘clunky’ would be a shallow analysis of what user experience should be in a digital world.

With an obsessive focus on technology, in particular, ClearTax has cracked the thing that matters. “You can’t get people’s taxes wrong… they’ll hate you for it,” quips Archit Gupta, CEO and Co-founder of ClearTax.

Getting it right early involves efficient use of capital by start-ups, among other things.

More than five years after kicking off business, word-of-mouth and digital promotions still take precedence over offline marketing or sales spends at ClearTax.

Notably, nearly 65 per cent of operating expenses go into R&D, according to the company’s founders. And all of this seems to have won ClearTax 6,000 SME users, alongside drawing 10,000 chartered accountants and 20,000 freelancers to its platform.

“This season we hope to see about three million people filing their tax returns on ClearTax. We’ve got 200 servers ready to handle the load, and of course, we’re cloud-based to be able to deliver that much more efficiency. We’re definitely hoping for a 300 per cent growth over the last year,” Gupta reveals.

ClearTax was tech-enabled to read as many as 400-500 different versions of Form 16, according to Gupta. And just days ago, the company launched a 2G-optimised mobile app that has the backend intelligence to allow users to file taxes both online and offline.

This was a result of an internal analysis that showed about 4 per cent of users filed their returns on mobile app last year.

“Being able to file offline means users don’t have to be hindered by intermittent internet connectivity,” Gupta says.

He expects more than five lakh tax returns to be powered through this app alone.

ClearTax is a strong showcase for the advantages of pioneering in a space like online I-T returns filing. Currently, 5 per cent of ClearTax’s users are senior citizens and as much as 60 per cent of its user base is between 21 years and 35 years.

Getting that many millenials on board as customers can be one of the best testimonials for cracking user experience in our times. But another is that ClearTax is now poised to take on a wider range of clients, from small businesses to large enterprises.