We are going to sell this product to accounting firms so they will be able to make the tax reporting process more efficient for all stakeholders – clients, staff and tax authorities.

We experienced tax-reporting problems in our own accounting practice and had seen it over and over again throughout our long careers as practice accountants.

Initially we’ve listened to our clients complain about how difficult it is to communicate their tax situation and send supporting documents to us.

We talked to other accounting firms who not only confirmed these frustrations but also their own frustrations – how indolent clients hold up the tax reporting process.

They will buy from Botfiler because we have a deep knowledge and experience of the exact same problems that they have, and we are solving it for them and sharing it with them.

We also know exactly how sensitive their client data is and are taking every precaution necessary to ensure the system is secure – GDPR compliance, ISO-27001 certification and the highest level of encryption.

We are also delivering this solution so that it is cost-effective – our main aim is to save accounting firms time and ultimately money (accountants are expensive).

Practicing Accountants will be able to redeploy staff to higher value added activities and give their clients more value for money.

For the past 2 years we have been honing our sales skills and spent the last 15 months growing our own digital accounting practice (from nothing  we didn’t even “come from” practice) – in our first year we made €75k in sales.

Before that we were commissioned as directors in a few startups. Mark worked in Circit.io, and Colin for Bleep.com and Cromorama.io.

For Botfiler, we will be adopting the following sales methodologies:

• Direct Sales utilising my extensive accounting network.
• Marketing campaigns (e.g. attending conferences such as Accountex London/Manchester, Digital Accountancy Show London, Professional Accountancy Birmingham, and Accounting Live in Glasgow).
• Putting ads into ICAI, ICAEW and ACCA publications and also accountingweb.co.uk
• Using SEO and Digital Marketing which will target accounting firm owners.

We will qualify leads before presenting them with a demo of the software and perhaps a free trial on a few of their clients, before moving on to a contract for sales.

Your investment will help us accelerate to a place where it is relatively easy to make a highly profitable product.

The biggest hurdle is developing a secure platform that can be used by accountants and clients alike. Once that foundation is in place, we are able to create content in the platform in the form of tax questionnaires e.g. Irish and UK income tax and corporation tax, etc and move on to other tax heads such as Payroll and VAT. Once the platform is built and these forms are prepared, the gross margins increase dramatically, as they only need minor modifications for tax updates each year.

We believe we can capture 10-20% of the price that an accountant charges to their client when using our product, as it does as much or more in terms of workload comparatively. In essence this means in the future we could be charging more than €100/tax return performed on our platform which has next to no cost of delivery attached to it.

The biggest pain points in tax reporting today are:

• Poor communication between accountants and clients
• Inability to securely transmit tax files
• Seamless abilities to filing and report tax in one place

There is a lot of heavy lifting in the process on the part of the accountant.

Botfiler will essentially remove the heavy-lifting aspect so that they only part left in the job is the review of the tax computation and fortifying of the client relationships. If the heavy-lifting component is taken out, the accountant has more time to add value to the client.

What’s more – the technology to achieve this exists today and has existed for at least 10 years – accountant’s are starting to whet their appetites to the ripening of this technology, and are ready to buy.