Building new generations of tax software and software developers

In Cornel van der Heiden’s office at Nextens lies a copy of Elsevier’s 1984 tax cassette, a relic from the earliest days of tax filing software. Today, Nextens’ tax software, part of the information group RELX (formerly Reed Elsevier), is used for around forty percent of all Dutch corporate tax, income tax, VAT and gift and inheritance tax returns. Together, Nextens and Betabit get the best out of this business-critical software.

Tax advice as a service

As Head of Technology, Cornel van der Heiden leads a team of about seventy people who develop software for the three Nextens product pillars: filings, advisory and knowledge. “Our customers expect us to deliver the correct tax filing program every year. But we don’t just want to provide software used by accountants and bookkeepers as a workflow tool; we really want to be an insights company and therefore offer tax advice as a service.”

To achieve this, we connect data from our customers’ accounting systems to our filing software and to the tax knowledge stored in half a million articles in our database. Using machine learning, we generate insights and advice that our customers can immediately benefit from. We are now further developing the system behind this.

Filling gaps and developing further

For several years, Betabit developers have been working in the tax team on new products and software. What contribution do they make to the success of Nextens, according to Van der Heiden?

“We can build good software ourselves. But within our own team we never have exactly the right or enough capacity to handle both maintenance of existing systems and development of new ones. Betabit fills those gaps for us. That may sound unflattering, but it is crucial.”

Through Betabit we have specialists on board who are broadly deployable, pick things up quickly and have the communication and social skills to quickly find their footing in a new environment. This ensures we maintain stable teams with the right composition. Without that, you cannot continue to develop.

Valuable ideas, feedback and criticism

Betabit consultants at Nextens are modest when describing their role, but they feel highly appreciated. For external specialists, being treated as equal to internal staff is not something you can take for granted everywhere.

“For me, it really makes no difference whether you are employed by us or by Betabit,” says Van der Heiden. “The developers from Betabit are full members of our team at every level. They celebrate with us after an important go live and are invited to participate in the hackathons we organize. In one of our teams, the most senior developer is from Betabit he largely determines how the new code is structured. More importantly, they fit our open culture and feel free to share new ideas, feedback and constructive criticism. That is extremely valuable to us. Nextens also benefits from the knowledge and experience they gain from other customers and from contact with their Betabit colleagues.”

Training a new generation

One aspect that contributes to the strong match between Nextens and Betabit is the ability to work in a technologically advanced environment. “We hardly have any physical machines anymore,” says Van der Heiden.

Development, acceptance and production all run in Microsoft’s Azure cloud. I can imagine that this is a pleasant working environment for software developers. For us, the cloud mainly means speed. This applies both to scaling up our capacity during the seasonal peak in tax filings and to developing and launching new products.

Cornel van der Heiden emphasizes how important it is to provide an educational, modern environment for software developers. “Of course, everyone would prefer to hire a unicorn with twenty years of experience. But I see it as an important task for Nextens to also bring junior developers on board and guide them in their growth. The fact that they may leave after a few years and apply what they learned at Nextens elsewhere is part of taking responsibility for training a new generation of software developers.”

“That innovative character that Betabit and we try to bring to our collaboration is something I find very important. As far as we’re concerned, we will continue this for many more years.”