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Introduction
As per the Income Tax Act, 1961, every individual having income greater than the basic exemption limit of INR 250,000 is required to calculate his tax dues taking into account various factors such as income, residence, investments, etc., and file his/her Income Tax Return (ITR) for the previous financial year before 31st July every year.
For salaried individuals, the tax is deducted by the employer u/s 192 of the Income Tax Act, 1961 from the monthly salaries, taking into account the information available at their disposal.
At the end of the year Form 16 is issued by the employer, giving details of the taxes deducted and deposited to the government.
Then, the employee must file his ITR to get a refund of any excess tax which has been deducted than owed or to avoid penalties.
Hypothesis
The ITR is filed after the end of the year, going through all the transactions that happened all over the past year, compiling the data, and then calculating and filing your ITR is a tedious task that is exhausting and also takes money out of your pocket to your consultant’s, if any. But since it is mandated by the government, it cannot be avoided.
At present, there’s no structured or formalized platform where one can learn about the taxes, and its filing process, and actually file his/her ITR themselves, saving and learning a ton.
This gap in the market gives us an opportunity to educate and empower our users.
Scoping of the Problem
Our major targeted audience is young working professionals, particularly those aged between 20-30, who are usually in the early stages of their career and are thus filing their taxes for the first time. Initially, it is a complicated process and can cause confusion.
Based on the above hypothesis, we interviewed 12 people from our target audience in detail and then surveyed 64 respondents with specific questions related to their tax learning journey, their current mode of filing their Income Tax Return and their receptiveness to our proposed app.
For the start we have targeted young working professionals as our audience, particularly those aged between 18-30, usually in the early part of their career, maybe earning for the first time and are thus filing their taxes for the first time or relying on somebody else to do this for them.
Initially, filing one’s own ITR might seem like a complicated process and daunting.
The demographic of the survey participants are as below:
Age: 18-30
Location: India
Education Level: Bachelor's degree and above
Annual Income: Largely above 5 LPA (i.e. eligible to pay tax)
Occupation: Salaried and self-employed
Main Areas of Research
To put the collected data into perspective, we formulated our main areas of research-
Past attempts to learn about tax: To understand how our respondents have historically tried to learn about tax and what are the major trends in tax education.
Current Scenario: To understand how users currently deal with their taxes - how they file their return and what problems they face in the process.
Receptiveness to our solution: To understand how we can structure our app to cater to the users’ pain points effectively.
A. Past attempts to learn about tax
1. Sources used to learn about tax: The collected data indicates:
2. Biggest Challenges Faced in Past Attempts: The below list indicates the major reasons for failure:
Lack of relevant content, usually confusing or oversimplified.
Respondent could not learn how to actually file taxes
Time-consuming process.
3. Current Understanding of Tax: Over 50% of respondents have a basic understanding but not enough to file ITR independently.
B. Current scenario
To understand how these users currently dealt with their taxes, we surveyed participants on their current method of filing ITR, to better understand the pain points and come up with a user persona.
1. Current Method of Filing ITR: Based on the collected data:
Majority of respondents file their ITR themselves.
Whereas rest prefer to delegate it to a Chartered Accountant.
2. Expenditure on Filing ITR:
Over 50% of respondents spend less than INR 1000 on filing taxes.
Whereas the others spend somewhere from 1000 to 5000.
3. Problems Faced while Filing ITR:
The biggest challenge in filing ITR is the difficulty in understanding the updates in the tax system,
It takes too much time and money for the whole process.
4. Does Respondent Invest to Save Tax?: This question was mainly posed to observe the trends in investments and understand if the app should prioritise educating users on how to save to invest tax.
More than 95% of the respondents invest
From the above 95%, more than 80% of the respondents invest in tax-saving instruments.
C. Receptiveness to our solution
Finally, to understand if we can pique users’ interest and onboard them onto our platform, we attempted to understand their willingness, time commitment, and preferred pedagogy.
1. Interest in Learning About Tax: As per the data 66% of our audience is highly interested to learn about taxes.
2. Time Commitment: Most of the people are willing to spend somewhere between 0-2 hours a week.
3. Preferred Pedagogy: Most of the respondents prefer -
A blended gamified version
Live assistance and videos.
Insights
1. Major Takeaways:
Major Observations | Implications for our Platform |
Existing tax education sources are complex, time-consuming, outdated and impractical. | The content should be engaging, relevant, personalised and practical |
Users are interested in learning about tax, but mostly only want to spend 2 hours a week | Content should be designed in a way that is easy to understand and retain and can be consumed in 2 hours per week. Helpful to create personalised recommendations depending on the time commitment |
Users have varying levels of knowledge - many users only have a superficial or base understanding of tax. | Helpful to start at a base level to help incorporate everyone’s needs. |
Most users invest to save tax | Would be advantageous to incorporate features that advise users on tax-saving investments. |
Users want to learn through a gamified platform, videos and live assistance | A gamified platform, as well as interactive elements, would be useful in content retention. |
2. User Persona
Final Problem Statement and Hypothesized Solution
Based on the above research, the following idea is proposed: A platform to empower young working professionals to take command of their taxes through a gamified Ed-tech platform and a guided filing solution.
Proposed solution: A website where people can sign up to
Learn about the taxation system (gamified tax simulator)
Fill out tax returns in a simplified manner (virtual filing assistant)
Currently there are many platforms which assist people in filing tax returns but the unique selling proposition for our website is that we provide an end-to-end solution that covers the entire tax return process - from education to final submission of all forms.
Product Design
1. Features
Since not every proposed implication can be implemented on the website, the idea is to design features according to these findings, and rank them under implementation effort and user impact.
Key | Possible Features | Implementation effort | User Impact |
A | Tax concepts are presented through games in simple, jargon-free language. | Mid | High |
B | Voice-overs to guide the user | Low | High |
C | User progress bar & leaderboards for every mission to encourage competition on the basis of the amount saved. | Low | Mid |
D | Share progress on social media | Low | Low |
E | Referral-based system for monetary benefits and extra feature access (Free office hours with CA, extra missions) | Mid | High |
F | Tax filing assistant & automated form with prompts to guide user | High | High |
2. Course Content (Missions)
The course content is divided on 5 heads of income which are Salary, House Property, Profits & Gains from Business & Profession, Capital Gains and Income from other sources. Each head comprises levels ranging from basic to expert.
Salary | House Property | Profits & Gains from Business & Profession | Capital Gains | Income from other sources |
Understanding of Form 16 | Let out and Self Occupied property | Scope of business income | When Capital Gain is charged? | Which type of income is calculated in this head? |
Basic Deductions like 80 C - PF, ELSS Mutual Funds, FD's, NPS, 80D - Medical Insurance, 80E- Interest on Education Loan | Standard deduction u/s 23 | Section 28 to 44 | How is capital gain calculated? | Taxability in case of gift |
Deduction calculation for HRA, LTC, etc. | Interest on House loan | Brief of expenses allowed and disallowed | Calculation of Capital Gain on sale of a. Land & Building b. Shares & Bonds c. Sale of jewellery and work of art | Deductions allowed |
Calculation of tax on Salary Income | Calculation of tax on income from house property | Tax calculation on business income | Basic Deductions like Sec. 54F | Tax Calculation |
3. User flows and User Interface
The below user interface and user flow has been mapped out -
User Flow - The user flow envisaged for this platform is as below;
User Interface
Flash Screen: As soon as the user opens the platform, the below loading screen appears.
Landing Page: The landing page below has a navigation bar/menu, giving the user the options to go to the gaming section, the tax filing assistant or the blog. The user needs to sign up and create an account to access these features.
Tax Filing Assistant: The user needs to fill out a few fields which will be rephrased and sourced from the appropriate ITR form. These are simple questions which will collect the user’s data (with consent) and populate them in the final ITR form in order to make the ITR filing process easier.
Gaming Page: Here the user can choose to play the “Real Life Simulation” which is an ongoing simulated portfolio with conditions that mimic real-life events - for instance, increase in inflation, increase in fixed deposit rates, change in laws etc. This is intended to help the user practice how to manage their money and save taxes in a simulated environment. Additionally, the user can choose to play “Missions” which are short gamified lessons that teach the user different concepts.
Notifications: To prompt the user to check up on their simulated portfolio or to remind them of important tax-related tasks in real life (for instance, filing of ITR before July 31), there will be notifications such as the below:
Important Metrics
In order to make sure that users actually land up learning new ways where they can save taxes, here are some of the metrics which define the success of our platform:
Device Source: This metric is important for us, in the beginning, to check which source the users prefer. Valid sources can be a laptop, mobile, tablet etc. This is will be helpful for us to know if our users would prefer a different platform eg. app than a website.
Churn Rate: Last but not least, in order to make the product stand out we will focus on the overall Client Churn rate. This metric will help us understand if our customers like what we are doing or not. On the basis of this metric, we can focus on the content or other features of the platform.
Success Metrics
In order to make sure that users actually land up learning new ways where they can save taxes, here are some of the metrics which define the success of our platform:
Number of Visitors: The number of visitors will help us to understand how the platform as a whole is performing in terms of reach to the users. Having a low number of visitors begs the need to do more marketing of the website. Whereas on the other hand, a high number of visitors is a good indicator but does not guarantee the success of the platform.
Active Users: This metric will help us understand how many people are actually coming back to the platform. This will also be helpful to understand if the content is working and if it solves their problems. The game will have a total of 20 missions initially but they will be continuously increasing. A person is classified as a user if he/she completes at least 4 modules out of the below 20 modules within 2 weeks of download. [Each mission takes roughly 15-20 minutes to complete]
Salary | House Property | Profits & Gains from Business & Profession | Capital Gains | Income from other sources |
Module 1 | Module 1 | Module 1 | Module 1 | Module 1 |
Module 2 | Module 2 | Module 2 | Module 2 | Module 2 |
Module 3 | Module 3 | Module 3 | Module 3 | Module 3 |
Module 4 | Module 4 | Module 4 | Module 4 | Module 4 |
Conclusion
The genesis of this app originated from the gap we observed between tax education and actually filing a tax return. There are various sources which do both, but there is no structured platform that completely meets a user’s needs to learn and practice filing taxes all in one place. Thus this platform is aimed at serving as a one-stop solution from learning about taxes in a gamified, easy-to-understand manner, to actually filing the income tax return in a timely, cost-efficient and convenient manner.
The core values which drive this platform are to demystify taxes for young working professionals, for whom dealing with taxes in the early years of their career can feel like an added burden to their fast-paced lives.
This platform is envisaged as a growing entity, which will continue to improve based on inputs and feedback from users and continue to serve users’ changing needs throughout their lives.
Meet the Thought Leaders
Kshitij Maheshwari is a growth and user experience-focused product manager. He has worked with some of the most innovative startups and technology companies in the bay area like Tesla, Roofstock and now is working on product lead growth for Invoice2go. Outside of work, you can find him enjoying deep discussions about the future of the Marvel universe and finding great new places to satisfy his sweet tooth.
Meet the Authors
Chaitanya Arora is an undergraduate student pursuing CSE at Budapest University of Technology and Economics. He is passionate about creating tech products to enable ease of living within society. He is part of the core team of the startup, Artive which is on the road to its first big win in Silicon Valley. With GGI he aims to upskill himself to be a better Product Manager.
Karan Sehgal is an experienced Business and Pre-sales Consultant with a demonstrated history of working in Banking & Financial Technology, Information Technology and Services, Ed-tech, and SaaS industry. A marketing aficionado, skilled in Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Marketing Research & Analytics, Financial Services and Outbound and Inbound Marketing. Karan is a strong consulting professional with a Bachelor of technology (B.Tech)focused in Information Technology from Vellore Institute of Technology.
Garima Jain is currently a GGI scholar with a B.Com Honours degree from Christ University. She is passionate about finance and social impact consulting, having worked with JP Morgan Chase as a wealth management operations analyst and more recently with Sattva in their non-profit advisory division. She enjoys working with big development challenges and aims to leverage her GGI experience to become more skilled as a problem-solver.
Nihar Khandelwal is a Chartered Accountant, currently working as an Associate with a boutique management consulting firm. He has previously worked with HSBC in its FP&A division. He is passionate about consulting and technology and works at their intersection to help businesses make a change at scale.
Outside of work, you can find him having conversations about startups, or making travel plans for his next outing.
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