About TaxBrain
Year-round UK tax planning information — free, cited, reviewed by qualified accountants.
What we're building
TaxBrain is a year-round UK tax-planning assistant for taxpayers who aren't ready to pay an accountant but still want to know they're not overpaying. It's built around a knowledge graph drawn from HMRC guidance, driven by an AI advisor that cites its sources, and reviewed by qualified accountants.
We cover England, Wales and Northern Ireland at launch. Scotland has its own income-tax regime and we're not confident enough in our Scottish rules to serve it yet — you'll see a line under our logo saying so. We'd rather be honest than half-working.
The three co-founders
TaxBrain is built by three co-founders — a product builder and two qualified accountants. Every piece of tax logic on the site — the knowledge graph, the optimisation chains the AI draws on, the calculator rates — is reviewed and approved by Aaron and Laurence. It's a shared venture, not a hobby project with an advisor on retainer.
Co-founder — product & build
Richard Allen
Non-technical builder. Spent years watching people he knew overpay tax they didn't need to, while the tools that could have helped were either unaffordable, out-of-date, or so generic they missed the levers that actually move the needle. TaxBrain is the fix. Responsible for product, engineering, and the commercial side of the venture.
Co-founder — tax lead
Aaron Burton, ACCA + CTA
Director, Edata Accountants Limited
Aaron Burton is a Chartered Certified Accountant and Chartered Tax Advisor with over 10 years' experience advising individuals and owner-managed businesses on tax efficiency. His specialisms span personal taxation (sole trader and partnership accounts, CGT, EIS relief, pension planning), corporation tax and statutory accounts, tax-efficient company restructures and remuneration strategy, VAT including cross-border, and EIS investment advice on both the company and investor side. He is Director at Edata Accountants Limited.
Co-founder — accounts & audit
Laurence Maynard, ACCA
Co-Founder, ABLM Associates
Laurence Maynard is an ACCA Chartered Certified Accountant with over 20 years' experience advising SMEs across a wide range of sectors. He founded New Age Accountants in 2013, which has since evolved into ABLM Associates where he is Co-Founder. Laurence specialises in audit and accounts with a focus on long-term client relationships, delivering proactive commercial advice rather than passive compliance.
Aaron and Laurence are not your accountants — TaxBrain is a planning tool, not an agency engagement. They approve the platform's tax logic; they don't review your individual tax return. If you need a professional acting for you directly, engage one.
How it works under the hood
Every tax rate, threshold and allowance lives in a single versioned JSON file, /data/tax-rates-2026-27.json. Every leaf value carries an HMRC source URL. When a rate changes, we update that file; every calculator and every AI prompt reads from the same source of truth. No figure can make it into an advisor response from the model's training data — only from the verified JSON. (See our Terms and Privacy Policy for the boring bits.)
The AI advisor is Claude, prompted with a graph of HMRC guidance we've indexed and your quiz answers. It cites sources for everything it tells you, so you can click through to the HMRC page it relied on and verify for yourself.
What we deliberately don't do
- We don't file your tax return. That's your accountant's job, or HMRC's online service.
- We don't act as your agent with HMRC.
- We don't serve Scottish residents for income tax (see above).
- We don't give regulated financial or investment advice — if you need a financial adviser, engage one.
- We don't pretend the AI is infallible. Every response ends with the tax year it's based on, and we tell the model to say "I don't know" rather than guess.
The company
Allen Living Limited (trading as TaxBrain)
Registered in: England & Wales
Company number: 14787139
Registered office: C/O ABLM Associates Ltd, Regus Stuart House, St Johns Street, Peterborough, Cambridgeshire, PE1 5DD
ICO registration: [ICO_REGISTRATION_NUMBER]
Contact: [CONTACT_EMAIL]
The registered office is at ABLM Associates, which is Laurence's firm — this is a shared venture, not a mailbox arrangement.
Get in touch
Feedback, suggestions, or corrections welcome — /contact.