Introduction

Column Tax offers a batteries-included tax filing experience that can be seamlessly embedded within your app. By integrating with Column Tax, you can pre-fill important user information such as personal information, tax refund direct deposit banking information, as well as information related to W-2 income or self employment expenses. You can also customize your own app UI or re-engage the user, based on information you receive about the user’s tax filing progress.

Column Tax keeps all data encrypted, secure, and confidential, both at rest and in transit. We use secure protocols, such as HTTPS and SSL/TLS, to protect data in transit. At rest, Customer data stored in databases is encrypted at rest using AES-256, block-level storage encryption, as well as additional per-column encryption for sensitive fields. Column Tax is SOC 2 Type I and SOC-2 Type II certified as well as authorized by the IRS as an e-file provider and transmitter.

The following diagram illustrates the transition between your app UI and the Column Tax UI, which can be customized to match your brand colors. Once inside the Column Tax UI, the user walks through a friendly and personalized tax filing flow to file their taxes with the IRS and relevant state agencies. They can exit the Column Tax UI at any point to return to your app.

Implementation Overview

The Column Tax API is easy to use and to customize, with the following client-side and server-side integrations:

Initialize a Tax Filing / Create a user: Your backend server sends a request to the Column Tax REST API to create a Column Tax user, pre-filling any existing information for the tax filing flow.
Launch the Column Tax UI: You will then receive a short-lived authenticated URL for the user to access the Column Tax UI.
Retrieve status information: Use our webhooks to keep track of where users are in the filing lifecycle.