For the past 15 years or so I have used a tax agent to help me prepare my tax returns.
But not working full time, and with tools like Claude Code in my pocket, this year I decided to build an app to help me prepare my tax returns for last FY and forever more going forward.
Took about a week longer than I initially thought, a 2 week process, but I needed to “cross the i’s and dot the t’s” as it’s taxes and we know that the tax authorities don’t fuck around.
Anyway finally at a point I can use it to file my return (a week late..) and in doing this work I have realised I am almost definitely going to get audited 🥲
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Nice work mate! What makes you think you’ll get audited? Added in a few “business lunches” as deductibles?
I just have massive deductions due to running a few big servers
Fair enough. Seems legit!
the odds are forever in your favor friend. Still super unlikely.
About how many hours of coding in that two weeks (versus, e.g., collecting and entering documentation like you'd have to do anyway if you used a third party service)?
Taxes for me (USA/Hawaii) take me about 8 working hours a year using an online service that is sometimes more annoying than helpful and which has politically advocated for keeping taxes complicated, so I'd love to replace them even if it didn't save me a few hundred bucks. But I'm not sure it's worth more than an extra ~8 hours of my time.
However, even if I don't go all they way in like you, you've inspired me to revamp some of my personal accounting to take advantage of AI. I've been just doing the same thing I did five and ten years ago without thinking about how new tools could make my process less cumbersome. Thanks!
Ahhh the old infamous Turbo Tax, commiserations!!
It wasn’t 2 week full effort.
Maybe a day or 2 so spent on another project.
And maybe 2 days “lost” to short days (kids/family stuff).
I maybe had 1-2 hours of collection to do, mostly already done throughout the year.
So I reckon about 6 days?
Definitely not paying off in a year, ROI in maybe year 3 or 4 onwards?
It was complicated due to leaving full time employment, having a study period (Chaincode’s BOSS program) and then contracting (starting up as a sole trader). So 3 different “regimes” to deal with. And one of the main challenges being working out deductions due to running servers where I self host LLMs and dev VMs etc - changing electricity rates and consumption.
I also want to be able to deal with the variety of docs that information needs to be extracted from automatically, but privately. Of course throwing them into something like Claude or ChatGPT is going to extract the information just fine, but I don’t want that leakage of private information.
So that leads to one of the key features being the leveraging of self-hosted Visual Language Model to do the extraction and information population. With prompt tweaking, and at this stage a number of fixed prompts for specific document types, this yields good results (and I’ve learnt just how sensitive the smaller self hosted models are to the prompt). FWIW I’ve been using Qwen3-VL-32B served via ollama for this purpose.
My wife and friends have asked me “can you make money off this”? I reply, probably, but I also absolutely do not want to be developing, maintaining or supporting tax software.
I did this for my own circumstances and because I wanted to get more mileage with coding agent tools and workflows.
Could it have been done quicker, yes.
Has it paid off, not yet, a few years still.
Am I glad I did it, hell yes!!
Four years to breakeven ROI seems good, and I'd rather write code than do rote work even if it takes moderately longer to write the code than to just do the work.
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Former Gun Carrying IRS Special Agent Exposes MASSIVE IRS RIP-OFF of the American People - Part 1
https://youtu.be/83cPgMBe08o