Companies dealing with business crypto needed saving from exhausting and complicated tax accounting workflows, and Tactic was the lifeline.
User Research
Design Systems
Series A funding of $11 million in September 2022
Tactic gets acquired by leading crypto tax software TaxBit
Crypto was starting to appear on more business balance sheets, but there weren't enough robust solutions to help Finance teams prepare for IRS tax reporting.
Companies dealing with crypto were at risk of IRS audits and huge fines if they weren't confident with their accounting. They needed to do things like report digital asset transactions as property or ordinary income, track gains and losses, and file the right forms. I joined Tactic as the first product designer and, with my partner-in-crime—the lead product manager, evolved the current platform to bring forth automated solutions that helped businesses do their taxes in a clean, compliant way.
As a company of 8, we didn't have a research function. Instead, I met with our in-house accountant and connected with a few customer friendlies to learn about how they "close the books".
Cost-basis and fees were hard to track down.
A Head of Finance had his engineers pull transactions from different sources to calculate these numbers, which takes about 40 hours per month.
Users couldn't self-serve in the current product.
Things like mapping a chart of accounts can only be done by contacting Tactic and having the engineering team set this up behind the scenes.
Customers spent too much time categorizing and labeling their transactions.
Crypto activity needs to be carefully categorized so they're subject to the correct reporting.
At the time, the product was only a barebones page of transactions. I redesigned it, and built out core workflows that Finance stakeholders and accountants needed in order to prepare for tax season.
The New Transactions Page
The Transactions page brings together financial activity from the user's various wallets and exchanges and automatically reconciles data, separates fees, handles price conversion, and calculates gains and losses.
Categorize transactions with ease
Categorizing crypto transactions is essential for accurate tax reporting, precise portfolio tracking, and regulatory compliance, allowing users to correctly distinguish taxable events like trades from non-taxable movements like wallet transfers.
Categorization can be based on a number of things: the addresses of the from/to wallets, amount, asset type, or a combination of these. Knowing this, we came up with a way to fully automate the categorization process using rules.
Rules engine for automating transaction categorization
A user won't have to manually touch the transactions as they come in. These rules could be applied retroactively.
Aside from product work, I stepped in to help establish Tactic's earliest version of a design language and brand identity to help build up a reputation of a trustworthy accounting platform and not some web3 vaporware.
