Context
Our client operates in US financial services. They hold the authorisations, memberships and licences needed to run tax preparation at national scale, and they wanted to put that network online.
Problem
Tax preparation is annually stressful for reasons that have little to do with tax. Finding a professional you trust is hard. Knowing whether they are qualified is harder. Once you have one, the process runs on email attachments and phone tag, and you have no visibility into where your return or your refund actually is.
The client wanted to combine two things the market treats as opposites: concierge-level service and online convenience. That meant connecting taxpayers, CPAs, enrolled agents and organisations in real time — with a permission model that reflected how a licensed tax network actually operates, not a generic user table.
Approach
The role structure drove the architecture. This is not a two-sided marketplace; it has taxpayers, licensees, master licensees, managers and ambassadors, each seeing a different slice of the same data with different authority over it. Getting that model wrong would have made every later feature harder.
We designed the database around those roles first, agreed the standard interface with the client, and worked through a shared channel so decisions did not stall.
What we built
- Public website for global visitors
- Admin dashboard covering all user activity across the platform
- Role-specific dashboards for taxpayers, licensees, master licensees, managers and ambassadors
- Taxpayer mobile app — deadline reminders, messaging, phone and video contact with tax professionals, tax and accounting news, billing status across personal and associated business accounts, and refund tracking
- Real-time communication — messaging, chat and video throughout
Results
The platform is in use across corporates, individual taxpayers and tax professionals.
Metric slot — needs client approval. Returns filed, professionals on the network, or average time from document upload to filing.
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