After nearly a decade of running her own tax and accounting practice, Shiloh Johnson noticed that the majority of her client demand was coming from one specific demographic:
Unlike large corporations that have multiple entities and entire tax teams in place to manage taxes and compliance, small businesses often have no choice but to figure it out on their own. In fact, 77% of small business owners reported that federal business income taxes were very or moderately burdensome, according to NFIB’s 2021 Tax Survey. Sixty-four percent of small business owners reported that
“New and very small businesses need a lot of help, and they don't have many resources,” says Johnson, who launched tech platform Complyant in 2019 to help her clients and other business owners better manage and understand tax rules and requirements. “I kept trying to find different resources to help them get through, and I couldn't find anything except a handful of blogs that were very poorly written. So I said ‘Okay, how I can better shift this.’”
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Complyant takes small businesses’ tax information and, using an AI-driven data tool, creates a yearly calendar and to-do list to help an organization stay on track with their taxes. The platform also helps business owners build a budget and create a “tax wallet,” helping them save money for fees or unexpected expenses.
Between managing federal, state and county taxes and keeping up with registration fees or even franchise taxes and fire permits, Johnson says, she’s seen plenty of entrepreneurs feel overwhelmed — and expert solutions available on the market are often costly. Having access to the kinds of resources and information provided by Complyant, she hopes, can be the difference
“I've seen businesses go bankrupt because the inability to pay their taxes became hundreds of thousands of dollars [of debt],” she says. “They're paying people to manage audits, the lawyers and they're trying to back-pay bills all while they can barely afford to make payment plans with the government, when a lot of times it can be really simple like paying a $25 fee on the first.”
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Complyant aims to provide one part education, one part platform and tool, Johnson says. And simplicity of communication was vital to bring true value to users and clients. Complyant takes business owners through a small onboarding process where they collect and compile all of their information for them, before walking them through their next steps and creating an action plan.
“There’s a lot of fear that has been created around the tax processing system,” she says. “And that fear creates inaction — they don’t know what to do, so they don’t do anything. And then they're getting in trouble instead of helping themselves.”
