TaxRise
Replacing a 15-Day Manual Process with a Self-Service Form
Over 40% of TaxRise clients had multiple unfiled tax years. Collecting what was needed took 15 to 20 days per client: phone calls, faxes, and unsorted document uploads. I designed a structured self-service intake tool to replace all of it.
CONTEXT
A manual process at scale
Before TaxRise could resolve a client's tax debt, every unfiled year had to be filed. The average affected client had 4 to 5 unfiled years. To gather the information needed, clients mailed documents, sent faxes, dropped things off in person, or went back and forth with a case manager over the phone, often without the documents they actually needed.
The intake process took 15 to 20 days per client. Reps were stretched across high case volumes. Scanned documents came in illegible or incomplete. There was no way for clients to see what they'd submitted, what was missing, or where things stood. Resolution couldn't start until intake was done, which meant the entire business pipeline was gated behind this bottleneck.
MY ROLE
Lead designer for six months
I drove the design from discovery through final handoff. I worked directly with the CEO, the lead tax professional, a Salesforce consultant, and the lead developer. The project had been flagged as a priority by leadership.
DISCOVERY
Learning the domain first
I started by studying how TurboTax, H&R Block, and FreeTaxUSA handled single-year filing. Not because we were building that, but to understand how the best products in the space structured the question flow. None of them dealt with multi-year filing, which was the core problem we were solving.
Time with in-house CPAs and case managers filled in what the competitive analysis couldn't. They'd done this intake hundreds of times and knew exactly which questions tripped clients up, what data was actually needed per year, and where the existing process fell apart.
The biggest design constraint coming out of discovery: the average TaxRise client had no tax literacy. They didn't know what a W-2 was, couldn't tell a 1098 from a 1099, and didn't understand the difference between state and federal filing. Everything had to be designed around that baseline.
Tax Organizer placement within the client portal
KEY DECISION
Carry-forward to solve the multi-year problem
The central design challenge: a client with 5 unfiled years shouldn't have to re-enter their employer, dependents, and address five separate times. We looked at two approaches.
The straightforward one: go year by year. Pick a year, fill everything out, move to the next. Simple to build, but for a client with 4 to 5 unfiled years, it's a painful amount of repetition.
The approach we chose: carry-forward. The client starts with their most recent year and completes each section (dependents, income, expenses, health coverage). At the end of each section, a checkpoint asks which other unfiled years share that same information. They check the applicable years; the data carries over. They only re-enter what actually changed.
Starting with the most recent year was deliberate. Recent information is easier to remember accurately, and it's most likely to match adjacent years, which makes the carry-forward more useful from the first checkpoint.
Carry-forward checkpoint applied at the end of each section
KEY DECISION
Plain language over tax terminology
Instead of asking clients to identify document types, the form asked about situations. Not "Do you have a 1098-T?" but "Did you pay for school?" Not "Do you have a 1099-G?" but "Did you receive unemployment?" The system matched their answers to the right tax forms in the background.
The year select screen showed every unfiled year with a clear status: not started, in progress, submitted. Clients could see their full scope upfront and track progress as they moved through it. For a process that could easily feel like it had no end, that visibility mattered.
Plain-language questions mapped to IRS forms behind the scenes
Year select: full scope and progress visible upfront
CONSTRAINTS
Designing for handoff from the start
Developer turnover was a constant on this project. Designs had to be documented clearly enough that someone new could pick them up cold. The tax team kept refining what data they actually needed, which meant requirements shifted regularly. The form also had to handle state vs. federal differences, multiple document categories, and client-specific tax situations for each unfiled year, all without becoming a system too complex for a non-technical client to navigate.
OUTCOME
Handed off, not yet shipped
I completed design and handoff over roughly six months and left TaxRise before the Tax Organizer was built and deployed. The projected impact was based on what the workflow changes would eliminate: 15 to 20 days of back-and-forth replaced with a self-guided form, unsorted document uploads replaced with structured year-by-year collection, and intake capacity no longer tied to rep headcount.
The carry-forward system was the part I was most confident in. It's the kind of decision that doesn't show up in a static screen. For a client with five unfiled years, it can be the difference between completing the process and giving up.
REFLECTION
What I'd do differently
I relied heavily on internal experts (CPAs and case managers) as proxies for client behavior. They knew the domain better than anyone, but they'd done this intake so many times that what felt complex to a client felt obvious to them. The design was solid on paper, but I'd want real clients walking through it before it shipped.
Even lightweight usability testing (three or four sessions with actual clients) would have caught things that expert interviews couldn't. Someone with seven unfiled years and no tax background experiences a multi-section form differently than someone who's been doing this job for years. I didn't have that perspective, and the handoff was the poorer for it.