Tax-lot planner that shows advisers the cheapest way to rebalance a family
TL;DR Taxlotplan is software for SEBI-registered investment advisers. It reads every tax lot a client family holds, then proposes the rebalance, fund switch or harvest that reaches the target mix for the least capital gains tax. Advisers pay a per-family subscription and stay responsible for the advice.
India raised the cost of moving money in July 2024. Short-term gains on listed equity now pay 20%, up from 15%, and long-term gains pay 12.5%, with the yearly exemption raised only from ₹1 lakh to ₹1.25 lakh[1]. Debt funds bought after April 2023 are taxed at slab rates however long you hold them[2].
So every rebalance has a tax bill attached, and most advisers just eyeball it. A family with four members and twenty funds has hundreds of purchase lots.
Which units do you sell, in whose name and in which financial year? Get that wrong and the tax moves by tens of thousands of rupees. Short-term losses can offset long-term gains, but long-term losses cannot offset short-term ones[2], and few spreadsheets track that properly.
What it does, in regulatory terms: decision-support software for registered advisers only. Taxlotplan does not advise investors directly. Under the SEBI Investment Advisers Regulations, anyone acting as an investment adviser needs registration, and an adviser using AI or automated tools stays solely responsible for the advice[3].
The seed pitched an AI that rebalances retail portfolios on its own to cut tax drag, so I reframed it. Telling an investor which units to sell is investment advice, so a consumer app would need its own registration and carry the liability for every trade. Selling to advisers keeps the regulated party in the loop.
The adviser imports a family's holdings and transaction history. Taxlotplan builds each lot with cost, date and tax status, then shows three or four ways to reach the target mix, each with its tax bill - sell the oldest lots, harvest losses first, use each member's exemption, or split the move across two financial years. It also plans moves from regular to direct plans, which are redemptions and trigger tax. The adviser picks one and sends it to the client.
The adviser pays, usually a fee-only registered investment adviser serving a few hundred families. My test price is a per-family yearly fee, set well below what the adviser saves the client in tax. Consumers can already get basic help free - one free investing app has offered a feature since 2022 that recommends selling units to use the yearly tax-free gains limit, though its guide still cites the old ₹1 lakh figure[4].
The July 2024 rate changes made every switch and rebalance costlier[1]. SEBI's amended adviser regulations, last updated in November 2025, make advisers answerable for any automated tool they use[3], so they need software that shows its working. The number of registered advisers has also grown to 1,057[5].
There is no public figure for spending on tax-aware rebalancing tools in India. The narrowest real number is the buyer count - 1,057 SEBI-registered investment advisers as of October 2026[5]. On the adjacent side, 2,304 registered research analysts[6] and the much larger pool of mutual fund distributors could use a lighter version. Treat those as later markets.
Free investing apps give individual investors a harvesting suggestion for the yearly exemption[4]. In the US, robo-advisers sell automatic tax-loss harvesting, selling losing holdings and buying similar ones[7]. Indian adviser back-office tools produce capital gains reports after the fact. I found no Indian tool that plans a rebalance across a family's lots before the trades, though web search was limited during research, so check again.
| Difficulty | Moderate (40/100) |
| Starting capital | ₹45–85 L |
| Time to launch | 5–8 months |
The tax logic is detailed but known. The hard parts are clean data, because statements from different sources disagree on cost and dates, and earning advisers' trust. One wrong tax figure in a client meeting and the adviser stops using you, no second chances. You also have to keep up with every Budget change.
The software itself needs no licence that we could find, as long as you never advise investors directly. Your customers are the regulated ones.
Building this outside India? The categories above usually have a local equivalent, so check with your own regulator.
The tax maths itself should be plain rules, not a model. A wrong tax figure in front of a client ends the relationship, so AI stays on parsing and drafting.
Want to work out the AI layer for Taxlotplan? Talk to Yash →
I like this one for a founder who has worked as a registered adviser or a chartered accountant doing investor tax, and who can write precise software. If you want a consumer app with millions of users then skip it. Prove first that 20 advisers will upload real family data and that the plans save at least ₹25,000 a year for a typical family.
Plan for roughly ₹45–85 L, mostly on engineers who can handle Indian tax rules and messy statement data.
Not if you sell only to SEBI-registered advisers and never advise investors yourself. Confirm the boundary with a securities lawyer before launch.
Yes. US robo-advisers already harvest losses in the US. Each country's tax rules differ, so you'd rebuild the tax engine for each market.
The free Taxlotplan validation kit has the line-by-line capital breakdown, the effort scoring, the adviser and data-protection checklist, a 14-day validation sprint with pass/fail targets, a 90-day launch plan, 10 interview questions for advisers, and 5 assumptions to test. Download the kit →
Thinking about building Taxlotplan or something close to it? The make-or-break work is getting tax figures exactly right on messy family data, and that's the kind of thing I help founders with. If you need a hand, you know where to find me. Talk to Yash →
For illustration only. Names are fictional and ideas hypothetical; sourced facts are real but may be out of date. Nothing here is legal, financial or professional advice, and Yash Khatri is not personally liable for any use of it. Read the full disclaimer.