One of the great features of ZacTax is that you can create your own arbitrary geographic regions by simply drawing on a map. You don't have to call or email us to do it for you, nor wait for us to find time to honor your request.

Have a question? Make a region and get your answer in seconds. And since you can have as many regions as you'd like, you can keep them around like a beloved member of the family, or treat them like Single-Serving Friends.

We recently added a new feature called Layers, which give you more power to organize your geographic regions.

But the one barrier that's stood between ZacTax users and total geographic independence has been the Shapefile. Shapefiles are geospatial vector data files, and if that means nothing to you, you should definitely keep reading.

Many cities have specific, perhaps even Council-defined, areas: TIFs, TIRZs, service areas, council districts, etc. And these aren't always fun to draw (believe us).

Fortunately, many such cities have GIS departments filled with friendly public servants who keep track of these geographic areas in their dark, cold, basement-like server rooms filled with powerful-but-hard-to-use geographic software. Usually, they are more than happy to export that data for their colleagues, and that export often comes as a Shapefile. But what happens then? Until now, you'd send that over to us via email and we could import it for you.

But not anymore!

You may want to sit down for this, depending on your heart health, but you can now import Shapefiles as geographic regions. After you upload your file, we parse it and present you a wizard that allows you to quickly import one or all of the included polygons. It's super simple and kind of fun.

Of course, we're always happy to do this for you if that's how you roll. Just send us your Shapefiles and we'll take care of the rest. But if you're feeling adventurous, give it a shot!