NextiaTax: turning a shoebox of receipts into a filable tax package

Canadian sole proprietors and freelancers face a specific, recurring, entirely avoidable form of misery: a year of receipts in an envelope, a spreadsheet that stopped being accurate in March, and a weekend in spring spent reconstructing what happened. The existing accounting products are built for businesses with a bookkeeper. Someone invoicing four clients and driving to job sites is not that business.

The gap was not accounting logic — that part is well understood. The gap was data entry. Every product assumed the numbers were already in the system, and getting them there was the entire problem.

Extraction had to be good enough that people stopped checking it, and honest enough that they could check it when they wanted to. A model that is right 85% of the time is worse than useless for tax records — it creates an audit liability while feeling like progress.

It also had to be cheap. At a few dollars a month per user, the per-document cost of the AI pipeline is not a rounding error; it is the business model. And it had to satisfy Canadian expectations around where financial data lives.

Finally, the capture experience had to be mobile-native. A responsive web page that opens a file picker does not compete with pointing a phone at a receipt on the passenger seat.

An extraction pipeline that takes a photo, an upload or a forwarded email and produces a structured transaction: vendor, date, amount, tax components split by GST/HST and PST, and a suggested category. Confidence is tracked per field, and low-confidence fields surface for review rather than being silently accepted.

A retrieval-grounded assistant that answers questions like "how much GST did I collect in Q1?" from the actual records, returning answers tied to the underlying transactions rather than generated prose. Grounding is the whole point: an assistant that estimates your tax position is a liability.

Native iOS and Android applications where capture is the primary interaction, plus a web application for the review, analysis and export work that is better done on a larger screen.

The supporting platform: passwordless authentication via Microsoft Entra, subscription billing through Stripe across a free tier and five paid tiers, project and trip tagging, duplicate-vendor detection, spend analysis, and T2125-organised export packages with GST/HST summaries.

All of it on Azure infrastructure in Canadian regions, encrypted in transit and at rest, bilingual from the database outward rather than as a translation layer added afterwards.

Per-page quotas instead of unlimited plans. The dominant cost in the system is document processing, so the pricing meter is pages, not seats. Aligning the price metric with the cost driver is what makes a $4.99 tier survivable. It also gives users a mental model they understand.

Grounded answers only, with the assistant metered separately. The AI assistant has its own quota per tier. That is partly cost control and partly product honesty: it signals that answers come from computation over real records, not from an oracle with unlimited opinions.

Bilingual as an architectural decision, not a feature. Categories, tax terminology and export documents differ between English and French Canadian practice. Building that in from the schema up cost more initially and removed an entire class of defect later.

Canadian hosting from day one. It narrows the infrastructure options and costs slightly more. For a product holding financial records for Canadian businesses, it removes an objection we would otherwise have to answer in every support conversation.

NextiaTax is live, on the web and in both mobile app stores, on a freemium model spanning a free tier through to a multi-business plan. Bank feeds via Plaid are in progress.

For clients, the relevant point is not the product itself but what building it required: a measured document-extraction pipeline, a grounded retrieval assistant, native mobile applications, subscription billing, passwordless identity, bilingual data modelling and Canadian-hosted infrastructure — shipped as one system, and operated since. That is the same work we do for you.