The Open Ledger accounting software company has launched a new product in time for tax day.
Meet PokétaxA game that helps make tax presentation quite fun. Instead of tax forms, users assume tax coaches (gymnastics leaders) that represent different parts of a tax form, such as income, deductions and credits. Each leader calls questions that help players complete their tax forms.
“Once your Pokétax execution ends, we guide you to the direct file site of the IRS to be officially sent,” Open Ledger co-founder, Pryce Adade-Yebesi told TechCrunch. The game is an adaptation of the open source Pokémon game called Pokémon Showdown, and promised that this was not an April Fool joke.
“This is real; it works. Fiscal fraud is not fun, and it is not the IRS,” he said.
Adade-Yebesi and Ashtyn Bell launched open earlier this year and raised a $ 3 million round directed by Kindred Ventures and Black Ventures. Adade-Yebesi said that his team first built this product, which is open source, like a joke. “Could we really achieve this?” He and his team reflected. The answer was clearly yes.
The game has an AI assistant that helps organize users’ responses, and players can win badges, discover new deductions, as they face tax coaches.
Taxes are such an uninpected part of being a good citizen that few founders think of turning the process into a game. In particular, in 2023, there was the game style game Tax Heaven 3000, where users arrived at an appointment with an avatar called Iris that asked questions to help complete a tax form. But that was only for the year of tax presentation 2022.
Adade-Yebesi hopes that adding fun to such financial processes will be “more attractive and much less sucking.”
Taxes must be submitted on April 15.
