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· 4 min read
Tax Matterz

We are very pleased to announce the launch of Help Desk. Help desk is an online app that allows users to gain more knowledge about all things accounting in the world of Tax Matterz (formerly Tax Matters | Accouting & Taxation Services | Auckland, NZ). Want to learn about how to pay your taxes online, what is GST, how to decode your banking transactions etc, well you can learn this and more on Help Desk.

Help Desk has been made in house powered by love 😍 while also harnessing the latest in web technologies. This project officially launched on 29 December 2022 but has been in use for a couple of months now. The journey to creating this app started nearly one to two years back. Help desk was designed and developed because the current FAQ page that we have lacks many important features that are desired in a knowledge base platform.

📕 Our Journey Of Creating Help Desk​

We first began by identifying what is required for an online portal that serves hundreds of clients.

🤔 Identifying Our Needs?

  • The platform should be fast to load for our clients.
  • Dynamic article content should be supported. By this we mean the ability to change the content of an article without needing to manually update the article first.
  • Heavily customizable to reflect the brand of Tax Matterz which customers have come to know and love.
  • Ability to add/update/edit/delete an article without requiring a technical software development staff member.

We researched various online platforms that were designed to serve as a knowledge base or frequently asked questions page and evaluated them one by one.

🚁 Evaluating Alternative Platforms/Software Products/Tools and Services:

  • GitBook - Lacked the support of dynamic content. Otherwise had a robust set of tools, including a cool WYSIWYG editor and ability to sync to git repos like GitHub.
  • BooGi Powered By Gatsby - Would not run. Seems to be an issue that many people experienced according to this link.
  • Gatsby GitBook Starter - Had similar issues to BooGi. Was not very developer friendly. Had some issues with styling and customising the site so this project was scrapped.
  • Docusaurus - Had the best developer support we had seen compared to any other project. Was simple to customise, add features, add additional articles. Had support for both documentation and blog websites. This was chosen as our platform to develop upon.
  • Zendesk - Doesn't support dynamic content. Seems slow to load, hence was not very performant.
  • FreshDesk - Similar issues to Zendesk, was difficult to customise and lacked support for dynamic content.
  • Wiki.js - Required a web server that supported various online databases like MySQL and SQLite. Hence was not very simple to use and maintain.

After months of exploring each competing technology solution, working out if it was right for us and clients.

📚 We Decided to Pick Docusaurus.io. So What Now?

  • We designed the User Interface on top of our selected platform.
  • Add additional features (such as Netlify CMS integration and additional PWA Android and iOS special app features).
  • Worked with the accounting staff to write the documentation and various article text.
  • Testing the platform.
  • Launching the platform.
  • Add new features and repeat the above steps.

Our vision 👀 for Help Desk is to continuously ship new features and articles to make our clients lives that much easier.

It is available for all modern mobile phones and computers. If you bought your computer in the last 10 years, or smartphone in the last 5-6 years, Help Desk should work fine on your device. We recommend using a supported operating system and a modern web browser such as Firefox, Safari, Chrome or Microsoft Edge. We don’t test Help Desk on other browsers.

📣 Services​

If you want an app like Help Desk or something else entirely to be made for you then speak to our lovely team and we will be sure to assist you. Learn more by visiting 'What Services does Tax Matterz Offer?'