Preparing an individual return in HopperTax

Part 2 taught the law. This part turns it into a working session with a real client, inside HopperTax, from the first click to a filed return.

The individual interview runs in eight steps: Who's filing?, Where in the world?, Residency, About you, Your income, Income details, Deductions, and Your estimate. Drafts save automatically, so a session can stop when a client has to find a document and resume days later without loss. The early steps do the framing work. Who's filing? separates a personal return from company, partnership, NGO, estate and trust work. Where in the world? captures whether the client lives in Nigeria or abroad, works remotely, or straddles two countries, which shapes the diaspora questions later. Residency records the state of residence, and Part 2 explained why that single answer decides which authority the return belongs to. About you captures identity and the Tax ID, and keeps the client's profile in sync.

Then comes the heart of the interview. Your income presents eighteen income types, from employment, business and freelancing through rental, investment, crypto, capital gains, dividends, interest and royalties, to agriculture, mining, oil and gas, pension, foreign income, inheritance, gifts and lottery winnings. The professional habit this part drills: ask about all eighteen, every time. Clients do not hide income so much as forget it, and the agent who asks about the crypto account and the plot of farmland is the agent whose returns survive scrutiny. Income details then takes the figures, and two disciplines from Part 2 carry over directly: annualise everything, and enter business or freelance income as profit, revenue minus expenses, never raw takings.

Documents live in the client's Document Vault: payslips, bank statements, receipts, the tenancy agreement behind a rent relief claim. HopperTax extracts figures from uploads and attaches a confidence score to each extraction. High confidence means the machine read the document cleanly; low confidence is an instruction to open the document and verify by hand. The score never transfers responsibility: the agent who files a figure owns that figure.

The Deductions step captures exactly the list the law allows: pension, NHF, NHIS, life insurance and rent. Your estimate then shows total income, deductions and the computed tax, calculated by the same code you hand-checked in Part 2. Before anything moves further, Smart Review runs its findings: missing evidence, inconsistent figures, a rent claim without a receipt. Findings are cleared, not argued with, and the pre-reveal checklist in this part makes clearing them systematic.

The commercial mechanics close the loop. Preparation is free from end to end: the interview, the computation and the finished package are all there to read on screen at no charge. What is paid for is filing, ₦5,000 for an individual return, which is also what lifts the print and download lock on the package. Human expert assistance rides in the same checkout as an optional extra, and every payment produces a printable invoice. An agent pays that full filing price and earns ₦2,500 of it back 14 days later on a clean filing, which Part 8 covers in full. For a roster client the engagement then walks the portal pipeline: intake, preparation, approval, signature and payment, filed, with the portal tracking each stage so nothing depends on memory.

The part ends with the mistakes that actually happen: monthly figures entered as annual, the forgotten side income, rent claimed without paper, the wrong state of residence. Ten questions later, Part 4 opens on business and company tax.