The idea behind Befiler is to make tax filing easy, affordable, and accurate for individuals. Since its launch in 2018 its growth has been astonishing. Merely in two years Befiler user base has increased to one hundred thousand plus which makes it Pakistan’s biggest online tax filing portal.
The founders of Befiler Mudassir Jokhio and Akbar Tejani recall that developing solution that collects the information and does the real-time calculation as per the Federal Board of Revenue (FBR) laws was not an easy task. To add further, the taxpayers in Pakistan are very small percent of population, and most of the individuals presently file their taxes through tax consultants, regardless of the quality they are provided with.
Another irony is that Pakistan has more than 100 million internet users but usability of apps in personal financial management category is an alien concept, and challenge is not only usability but instilling trust among taxpayer to use online tax filing portal is nigh impossible but Befiler’s founders accepted that challenge.
As they further recall, the first two years were very challenging for them as they attempted to build trust and confidence in users to use Befiler for filing their tax returns but today Befiler’s revenues and user base have been increasing exponentially, and in recognition of this success recently Befiler has been awarded ‘Startup of the Year’ award by Pakistan Digital Awards (PDA)..
Today Pakistan is excelling and rapidly adopting the digital way of life due to Covid19, and pandemic has motivated people to explore digital solutions for their problems be it health, education, or financial services such as tax filing. It is really fascinating how fast we as a nation are adopting this new way of life.
Initially Befiler was catering to only individual NTN registration and tax filing cases. This year Befiler is launching 24 new categories owing to the high demand for professional digital tax filing services for categories such as freelancer, professional, pensioner, trader, importers and exporters, etc. Now persons belonging to these categories will be able to file their tax returns using Befiler’s portal. NTN Registration for sole proprietor, and AOPs, trade mark registration, sales tax filing, and other related business services are also being offered at nominal fee.
As Pakistan is growing fast in the ambit of Information Technology, we believe that Befiler can play a vital role not only in encouraging users to be tax filers through digital platform but also play significant role in building a documentation culture for increased financial inclusion.
