As we at [smartsteuer](https://www.smartsteuer.de) really enjoyed how our [Smartsteuer Smartphone App](https://www.smartsteuer.de/online/steuererklaerung-online/#smartphone) was imagined and eventually created, I thought it might be fun to write about it. This blog post is not that much technical but describes our journey to a product which (hopefully) will create value for our customers.
At smartsteuer we create tools for people who want to do their tax filings online. For that, we continuously seek for smart solutions to make this task as easy as possible. One example is an app that we created to answer one question which always nags our customers:
To answer this seriously you have to do a whole lot of calculations for which you need quite some information from the user. Which in turn would create a process which is _not_ fast and easy. So, some years ago we created this app which would do two things:
The result couldn't be exact but it was good enough to answer said question. It worked quite well even though you still had to provide those five figures.
Now, with the help and cooperation of our fellow colleagues from "Haufe Lohn & Gehalt" we wanted to take the app to the next level. It was our aim to reduce the number of questions the user needs to answer and at the same time increase the accuracy of the calculation. I will spare you the details but the result of our efforts was a QR-Code which every user of "Haufe Lohn & Gehalt" would get and which would contain all wage and tax information an employee needs to file her taxes.
You might wonder why I am writing the blog post in the first place, as this sounds all to familiar and is in any regards special. Well you are right. Up until here this story is _only_ an example of solid work. But please bare with me and read on.
About an hour before the agency would come by to kick the project off I was holding an internal meeting to get everybody on the same page. During this meeting it came to light that the project somehow managed to stay under the radar and that everyone in the room did not know about it. This is quite uncommon in our company as everybody is eager to know what is going on and to contribute her ideas and we encourage everyone to do so. But in this particular case this somehow did not happen until said meeting.
It turned out that, while we would get a lot more data to replace some of our guesses with real values, the user would still need to answer four out of the former five questions and instead would need to turn on the scanner and snap the code. That was not the benefit we hoped to deliver.
Luckily we did not stop there. When you happen to have a bunch of smart people in the room, new ideas come up and so a totally new app slowly came into shape.
**What can we do with that qr-code?** It contained lots of data which the user would need to manually enter into her tax filing - a tedious and error-prone process.
**What if we could transform the qr-code-scanner into an input device for our software?** We would need to find a way to link the app with the software without needing the user to do some fancy stuff or even worse needing to understand the whole process. And at the same time keeping her data safe and protected.
Well, we had to start the meeting with a lot of apologies. The app we original signed up for was from the table but we still wanted *an* app. Luckily our agency was flexible enough to adapt to the new plan and within only one week we had a working prototype. From that day on everything worked according to the plan and now our Smartsteuer App is available at the [IOS App Store](https://itunes.apple.com/de/app/smartsteuer/id1068423226?mt=8) and will be very soon be in the Android Play store as well (We will post the link as soon as its up). Check it out if you like and let me now what you think.
Finally I'd like to give a big shout out to our colleagues at [Haufe-Lexware](http://haufe-lexware.com) and to our agency [Wissenswerft](http://wissenswerft.net) for the great teamwork and flexibility!
