PiloTax
A Dutch tax and bookkeeping app for the self-employed, covering the hour criterion, VAT returns and deductible costs, with an AI advisor that knows your numbers.
The Problem
Dutch self-employment tax is a paperwork trap with real money in it. To claim the zelfstandigenaftrek you must prove 1,225 hours of business time in a calendar year. Most people assemble that proof in January, from memory and bank statements. BTW is filed quarterly. Deductibility is full of edges: gemengde kosten drop to 80% above a threshold, KIA applies to investments over €450, representation costs are only partly deductible.
What It Does
On the phone or in the browser, you log hours, expenses, revenue, trips and assets. Photograph a receipt and it extracts vendor, date, amount ex VAT and the rate. The dashboard shows hours against 1,225 with the weeks left in the year. Each expense category carries its deductibility rule on the entry form, so the decision happens at logging time rather than at filing time.
There's a tax advisor you can talk to in Dutch. It answers using your actual revenue, hours, sector and start date, and can write entries itself. "Ik heb gisteren een MacBook gekocht voor €2.400" becomes an asset with a depreciation schedule and a KIA flag.
Quarterly BTW comes out as Belastingdienst box numbers. Everything exports to DigiBoox.
The hard part
Tax figures change every year, and they surface in two places: the screens a person reads, and the answers the advisor gives. If those two ever disagree the product is worse than useless, because the confident wrong number is the one people act on. Most of the design went into deciding where the truth about a given year lives, once, and refusing to let anything else restate it.
The second problem was VAT on foreign purchases, where the correct treatment sometimes depends on a fact the receipt doesn't carry. Guessing is unacceptable. So is blocking someone's return until they answer a question they can't answer today. The filing stays correct, and the genuinely ambiguous cases wait for a human decision instead of holding everything up.
My favourite piece is quieter: your hours can be reconstructed from the trail of work you already left behind, rather than remembered in January.
One codebase, a web app and a mobile app, with the rules kept apart from both.
Where It Stands
The web app came into being over a single day in April 2026, and almost everything since has been built there first. The most recent work, in July, was not a feature at all: it was pulling years of my own bookkeeping through the product to see whether the numbers came out right.
In development, not launched. Web and mobile both cover the core registers, and I run my own books through it, which is the sharpest test I have. It isn't on sale yet. The next milestone is somebody else's books rather than my own.
Next project
Prima Polis