Each year the tax return arrives like an unwelcome relative — full of questions, in no hurry to leave. This year I sat an assistant across the desk and let it conduct the interview, asking everything the form requires, in order. The wager is that being asked is faster than being lost.
Running. The assistant has asked me things my own accountant never thought to, which is either thorough or alarming.
The full report is open — what it cost, what broke, the step-by-step of how I ran it, and what I'd do differently.
The conventional return is less a document than an ordeal — a long afternoon of hunting for figures one does not remember filing. I wished to replace the hunting with answering, and so I built an assistant that interviews rather than waits.
It asks; I reply; the ledger fills itself. The assistant has asked me things my own accountant never thought to, which is either thorough or alarming. The wager is that being asked is faster than being lost.
What you need
One assistant for a single month, a phone to scan documents, and a folder into which you have gathered the year. The cash outlay is slight; the cost is mostly the courage to start.
Gather the shoebox
Pull together the year's documents — payslips, receipts, statements — into a single folder before you start. The assistant can interview you, but it cannot rummage in a drawer you haven't opened. Half an hour of gathering saves an evening of guessing.
Here is how it runs with the assistant — let it ask, make it cite, check it sceptically, then file the dull old way yourself.
Let it ask the questions
Rather than facing a form, let the assistant interview you in plain language — one question at a time, branching on your answers. Answer honestly, including "I don't know," which it can usually resolve. This reverses the ordeal: it remembers the order of fields so you needn't.
Make it cite each line
For every figure it proposes, ask which document and which rule it came from. A number without a source is a liability, not a deduction. You are assembling a return you could defend, not a confident guess.
Check the suspicious and the missing
Read what it produced with a sceptical eye — both the numbers that look too good and the deductions it never raised. The assistant is fluent but not your accountant; it will not know your one odd circumstance unless you mention it. This is the half-hour that earns the speed.
File it the normal way
Transfer the finished figures into the official channel yourself — the tax office wants its own forms, not a chat transcript. Keep the assistant's working alongside your documents in case anyone asks later. The speed was in the assembly; the filing remains pleasingly dull.
Ongoing — this year's return is gathered but not yet sent. The interview is genuinely faster: what once took an afternoon now takes, so far, the better part of an hour, and the questions arrive in a sensible order.
It saved real time and surfaced two errors of its own making, which I count as roughly honest. The evidence is still putting on its coat.
The cost is mostly the courage to start; the cash outlay is slight.
It will assemble the return in an hour and cannot, alas, make you enjoy having done it.
Being asked beats being lost
The interview is genuinely faster, and there is a quiet pleasure in being asked rather than left to flounder. The questions arrive in a sensible order, and nothing essential has yet been forgotten.
Confidently wrong on the particulars
It is confidently wrong about the particulars of German tax law more often than I would like. Twice it invented a deduction with great conviction; I caught both, but only because I knew to look. I trust it to ask the questions, not to know the answers.
The clerk, not the advisor
This assembles the answers; it does not file them, and it is no substitute for a professional on the genuinely thorny matters. I treat it as the diligent clerk who prepares the file, not the advisor who signs it. The judgement, as ever, remains mine.
The next move is to actually file this year's return and then, next year, see whether the assistant remembers nothing — and whether starting from a blank interview is still faster than the old ordeal.
The open question is how far I dare trust a tool that is fluent, persistent, and occasionally, confidently wrong.