Founder Desk

Each deadline is a rule in a config file: who it applies to, how its date is calculated (a fixed date, days after the financial year end, monthly, quarterly, or days after another deadline), what happens if it's missed, and its sources. A pure function turns the company profile and today's date into the next twelve months of dated deadlines, so a founder without an Indian subsidiary never sees GST or MCA filings.

Before launch I checked every rule against official sources, and the check changed the product. DIR-3 KYC for directors had moved from an annual filing to once every three years in March 2026. The ODI annual performance report was due on 31 December, not 30 June as my first draft said. And an Indian subsidiary that trades with its US parent usually needs a transfer pricing report, which moves its income tax return from 31 October to 30 November. Three of seventeen rules were wrong or outdated in a draft that looked finished.

That's why there are three badges instead of two. The US rules (Delaware, Form 1120, Form 5472, 1099-NEC) are Verified against the Delaware Division of Corporations and IRS pages. Most India rules are Reviewed or Unverified, and the app says so.

Most of the subtle bugs in a compliance calendar are about dates, not rules.

Timezones. Deadlines are stored as calendar days, never as timestamps. A founder in India at 1am and a Delaware deadline that is still "yesterday" in New York must never disagree by a day. The tests pin instants near midnight in IST and US Pacific time.

Weekends. My first version moved every weekend deadline to the next business day. That's right for the IRS, which says so in its instructions, and wrong as a blanket rule. For most Indian filings there is no general rule like it, and for Delaware I couldn't confirm one. Showing a founder a later date than the real one is the worst mistake this product can make, so each rule now has its own convention: next business day, none, or unknown. The legal date is always the one shown and sorted on. An "effective date" appears only as a secondary line where the rule allows it.

Fiscal years. Form 1120 is due on the 15th day of the fourth month after the tax year ends, except for June 30 year ends, which are due a month earlier. It's one line in the IRS instructions, and a test in the code.

Founders get notices as PDFs, emails and letters. The inbox takes pasted text and returns the document type, issuer, a one-line summary, the key fields, a deadline and the required action. Every field comes with a short quote from the source text and a confidence level.

Nothing is saved until the founder reviews it. Low-confidence fields are highlighted, every value is editable, and the deadline goes to the calendar only when they click to add it. When a notice matches a built-in rule — say, the real AOC-4 date for their own company — the app offers to update that deadline instead of creating a duplicate, and the update can be reverted.

The model sits behind one small interface, so switching between Gemini, Claude or a mock provider is a single setting. The four sample documents never call the live model; they load saved results so a visitor can try the full flow at no cost.

The franchise tax checker calculates both Delaware methods with exact fractions rather than floating-point numbers, because par values like $0.00001 break ordinary arithmetic. When the default method already gives the lower amount, the checker says the founder's bill is already the best option instead of inventing a saving.

The calendar exports .ics files as all-day events so dates land correctly in Google Calendar and Outlook. The project has 112 automated tests covering the tax engine, the date logic, the rules, the AI response parsing and the quota handling. I built it in Cursor, using Claude to plan phases and review decisions, and committed phase by phase so the history shows how it came together.