The Company
Mainstreet is a platform that helps startups uncover and claim tax credits and government incentives. Since they first launched two years ago, Mainstreet has helped over 1,000 startups claim $80 million dollars.
They’ve done so by creating a seamless platform that takes care of all their clients’ paperwork needs. Mainstreet’s software connects directly with payroll platforms such as Gusto, Justworks, QuickBooks, ADP and more. Each month, they scan for available federal, state, and local tax credits. If there’s a match, clients can receive a portion of their benefit immediately as a cash advance with no interest.
The Challenge
Searching for and filing government tax credits is a paperwork-intensive process. Many small business owners and startups know the frustration all too well. There are a plethora of available credits like the R & D Credit, Work Opportunity Tax Credit, Small Business Health Care Credit, and many more. Each requires PDF forms that need to be filled out, downloaded, and then submitted to the relevant agency.
Before finding Anvil, MainStreet had to manually fill out PDFs for every customer to help them apply for each credit. Without a comprehensive platform that could perform these steps, it would take them hours per client. This significantly limited their ability to scale and grow.
The Solution
Using the Anvil PDF filling API, Mainstreet was able to create an automated and seamless process for completing tax credit paperwork. Anvil provided the tools to quickly templatize required government forms. Our simple web interface made it extremely easy to specify blank fields, assign a field type, and a Field Alias. Once the template was created, Anvil would provide a unique URL that could be used to pass data to the PDF form and fill in the blank fields.
The Field Alias was a particularly helpful feature that made it easy to associate blank spaces on a PDF to database objects living in Mainstreet’s system. This provided a standardized way for mapping database objects to blanks across a library of PDFs.
The Result
With Anvil’s PDF filling API, Mainstreet has seen a notable increase in efficiency, allowing them to focus on long-term growth. Researching and filing government tax credits used to take hours per client; now for MainStreet it only takes minutes. Our tools have given Mainstreet a simple, automated solution that allows them to spend more time focusing on each client’s experience instead of just filling out forms for them.