For years, Calvin Woodroffe (Industrial Economics, 2011) had a front-row seat to the financials of the UK’s biggest corporations. Today, he is leveraging his experience by starting Pocket Tax, a UK software start-up company designed to make personal tax advice and support simple, clearer and accessible to everyone.
"I wanted to focus more on helping working people rather than organisations," he says.
Like many Industrial Economics graduates, Calvin moved to London after graduating from the University of Nottingham, and followed a well-established path into the City. Over a decade-long career at KPMG, EY, and Mazars, he saw firsthand how these firms deploy teams of specialists to navigate intricate tax and accounting legislation. This experience highlighted a significant gap: while large corporates and high net worth individuals benefited from elite, specialised advice, such resources remained largely out of reach for the average person.
However, after building a successful career across accounting and consulting roles, Calvin found himself at a crossroads. Feeling burnt out, he took a six-month sabbatical - a period to rest, reset and re-evaluate the trajectory of his life.
"I was having a huge amount of burnout from work,” Calvin admits. "The long hours and stress that had accumulated over many years made it difficult to gain any perspective or time to think about what I truly wanted in life. I asked for a sabbatical which my employer at the time was supportive of and agreed to.”
During this period, Calvin realised he was after something else. Calvin's initial instinct was to set up a traditional boutique accountancy firm, but he quickly recognised this model meant he could realistically only serve those who could afford premium fees. To make a real impact, he needed a different model.
"I wanted to help a lot of working people at scale," he explains. Calvin wanted to develop software where “tax is made simpler so that the stress and anxiety it may cause is reduced and importantly hardworking taxpayers don’t miss any reliefs so they don’t overpay tax.”
This problem-solving mindset has its roots from his time studying Industrial Economics at Nottingham. Drawn to the microeconomic side of the discipline, Calvin says he valued the course's focus on how businesses operate in a market and how government policies impact business decisions. This helped Calvin with strategic decision-making skills, including how to compete with market incumbents, pricing, funding decisions and software design.
Without a background in software development, Calvin partnered with an experienced software engineer, collaboratively developing the software.
At the moment, Pocket Tax is tackling a timely challenge: the government’s Making Tax Digital initiative, which requires self-employed individuals and landlords to submit quarterly updates via approved software. Calvin is currently working with a pilot group of early users, offering the product and his personal expertise free of charge in exchange for feedback - a cautious, trust-first approach in a highly regulated industry.
His long-term ambition remains steadfast. "In a cost of living crisis, the government can introduce a brand-new tax relief, but if the people who need it most don’t know it exists, it fails," he notes. After over a decade working within the system, Calvin is realistic about its complexity but optimistic about change.
Calvin found the clarity to reshape his future. In doing so, he has found a way to make a complex system work better for everyone - one taxpayer at a time.