Benji Tax

Sole proprietors in the US and Canada use Benji Tax to track business expenses, find tax write-offs, and file taxes—all in one place. Unlike traditional accounting software where users need to remember to keep their books up-to-date, Benji proactively sends users a message when it finds a potential tax write-off. Users can accept Benji’s suggested categorization of their bank account and credit card transactions, change it to another category, or contact a dedicated bookkeeper for help if they’re unsure. Come tax time, all of the user’s transactions are categorized and they can easily file their federal and state taxes through Benji (US only) or export the tax report to file taxes themselves.

User Onboarding

We purposely have a longer onboarding than what most people might expect from a financial software. For Benji Tax, we consider everything up until the user has reviewed their first transaction to be onboarding. Our onboarding is split into three parts:

1. sign up
2. bank connection
3. initial transaction review

Users go through between 14–16 screens before they can create an account (sign up flow). From there, users go through another six screens (bank connection flow) before they can see the core parts of the app and review their first transaction through our chat experience (initial transaction review flow). This whole process takes less than 10 minutes.

It's worth highlighting that each screen consists of one question or action. Each screen also includes what might be considered “a lot of text.” While this might seem unnecessary or overwhelming, our users appreciate this effort given how just the mention of taxes or IRS can make people nervous. By focusing on one question at a time—with additional help text to expand on the question with an example—users can make their way through onboarding with confidence.

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User Engagement

Our initial app, Benji Finance, helped self-employed Canadians keep track of their business expenses. Once we had the tool in the market for some time, we noticed most people wouldn’t use the app regularly; once a month at best. Majority of the users left their expense tracking until tax time. We found this behaviour odd since we felt they could save time (and headaches) by logging into Benji Finance once a week or so.

As we investigated this issue, we learned that the number of steps needed to be taken to review a transaction created just enough friction to delay the task for later. Imagine you receive an email reminding you to review your transactions. You then go to the site and proceed through the log in flow—let's hope you use a password manager or asked your browser to remember your password. You then see a list of unreviewed transactions, and potentially start reviewing your transactions.

To overcome this issue, we felt a chat experience (within an iOS app) where the bot would proactively message you when it finds a potential tax write-off, and you simply had to choose yes, no, or identify the correct category, could greatly improve user engagement. This would require less of an effort since you would be automatically logged in via Face ID and can quickly respond to the message from Benji. Plus, once you respond to the message, Benji asks if you have time to review more transactions. If you don't, that's okay. However, if you do, then you're able to make further progress on your bookkeeping.

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Category Group

To ensure the voice and tone of our chat experience felt natural (like talking to a friend), we created category groups for our simple categories. For example, meal-related expenses would be part of the “business meals” category group. And, if a transaction was categorized with one of the simple categories that belonged to this category group, we can use this info to phrase how Benji asked about a meal-related transaction. For example, instead of asking “what was this Starbucks ($12.17) expense on Jun 12th for?” Benji asks “was the Starbucks ($12.17) on Jun 12th for a business meeting?” It’s a simple change in how the question is phrased, but it makes Benji seem smart and engaging with it feels more natural.

This approach of asking questions based on category groups also helps users focus on the context in which the expense occurred—which is crucial since context matters when determining which tax form categories the transaction should be allocated to. For example, hiring a photographer to take photos of your D2C product would be categorized as advertising whereas hiring a photographer for the wedding you’re filming would be categorized as a subcontractor.