📊 Inspiration
Filing taxes can be overwhelming, especially for students and first-time filers. We were inspired by the need to simplify the tax process and help users complete their 1040 Form with ease. Another reason why we wanted to create TaxMaxx is because tax season is right around the corner, so we wanted to create a solution for it just in time.
📝 What it does
TaxMaxx allows users to upload their W-2 and 1098-T tax documents and extract key data to then implement into their 1040 Form (tax return). For the backend, the program calculates a draft 1040 summary with values like total income, tax withheld, and potential refund. And then we then have AI-driven parsing and deterministic calculations to provide accurate tax estimations. The program then takes these tax estimations and the frontend displays the tax summary and allows users to make corrections or ask follow-up questions via a chatbot.
⚙️ How we built it
Frontend: Built using React with a Vite setup for fast and resusable development. Features include: Document upload, summary display, chatbot for user questions, and dark mode.
Backend: Developed with FastAPI, providing endpoints to process the uploaded documents, extract values, and run tax calculations. Data Flow: W-2 and 1098-T PDFs are parsed, stored in MongoDB, and fed into the calculation pipeline for 1040 draft values.
Tech Stack:
Frontend: React + Vite
Backend: FastAPI + Python
Database: MongoDB Atlas
Azure Document Intelligence for document parsing (with mock support).
🛠️ Challenges we ran into
Some challenges we ran into included accuracy of document parsing when parsing the tax docs, handling different document formats that we may encounter, tax calculation pipeline, and frontend<->backend integration.
To be specific:
Accuracy of document parsing: Ensuring that the AI correctly extracts values from W-2 and 1098-T PDFs with real-world variability.
Handling different document formats: Implementing robust error handling and validation for various formats.
Tax calculation pipeline: Implementing a deterministic tax calculation system that works with user data.
Frontend and Backend integration: Ensuring seamless interaction between the document upload, data parsing, and frontend display.
🏆 Accomplishments that we're proud of
Successfully built a working prototype that allows users to upload tax documents and receive an accurate 1040 Form tax summary.
Integrated AI-driven document parsing that accurately extracts key values.
Built an interactive frontend with clear and useful data visualizations for tax preparation without confusing the user.
Created a basic chatbot that helps users understand their tax data and ask follow-up questions.
💡 What we learned
What we learned while working on this project included: How to use Azure Document Intelligence for parsing documents, how to use FastAPI for building scalable APIs, integrating with databases like MongoDB, how to encounter challenges in parsing real-world PDFs and built error handling and validation systems, and the importance of clear UI/UX when dealing with complex data like tax forms to make the process intuitive for users.
🔮 What's next for Project
What we want to include in the future for this project is improving parsing accuracy by enhancing the parsing pipeline to handle edge cases in real tax documents, extend 1040 Form calculation by expanding beyond the MVP tax lines and including more detailed deductions and credits, having chatbot enhancements by having it provide more insightful answers and corrections for user data, and we could also implement user accounts so users can save their progress and return later.
Log in or sign up for Devpost to join the conversation.