AI for tax and accounting firms that ship work, not friction.
Document parsing, secure client portals, retrieval over IRS publications and state codes, audit defense knowledge bases, and ITIN ready intake. Built by an engineer who has shipped to a real CPA firm in Northwest Arkansas.
Tax season runs on paper, panic, and copy paste.
Every tax firm we have spoken to ships the same four bottlenecks. Manual document intake. Repetitive client questions. Compliance research that takes hours. And a phone that rings during the worst possible week of the year. AI fixes all four when it is built into the workflow you already run, not bolted on as a separate product.
- Manual document intake. W2s, 1099s, K1s, receipts, ID documents arrive in every format. Staff retype them into Drake, Lacerte, ProConnect, or UltraTax.
- Repetitive client questions. "Where do I send my W2?" "What is the deadline for an extension?" "Do I qualify for the QBI deduction?" The same five questions, every week.
- Compliance research that takes hours. Multi state apportionment, R and D credits, ITIN procedures, audit defense memos. Each requires reading multiple IRS publications.
- After hours phone load. Calls during family dinners during peak season. No firm scales that way.
Sources: IRS Publication 17, IRS Section 199A guidance, IRS ITIN program.
Five capabilities that fit inside Drake, Lacerte, ProConnect, or UltraTax.
Document intake automation
Receipts, W2s, 1099s, K1s, IDs extracted to structured fields, validated against IRS schemas, routed into the prep system you already use. Vision and OCR pattern.
- multi format ingest
- field validation
- audit log
Client portal AI assistant
"Send me last year return." "What documents do you need from me?" Answered in plain language, twenty four hours a day, with cited links to your firm policy. Chatbot pattern.
IRS publication RAG
Staff query the entire IRS publication library plus state codes in plain English. Retrieval Augmented Generation, citations every time. Knowledge base pattern.
Audit defense memo drafting
Past responses, IRS form definitions, and current regulation feed a writing assistant for IDR responses, 30 day letters, and CDP hearings.
After hours voice agent
Phone agent answers basic questions, schedules calls, takes secure document drop offs, escalates emergencies. Voice pattern.
Handled Tax and Advisory.
Handled Tax and Advisory is a tax and accounting firm in Northwest Arkansas serving small business owners, self employed clients, ITIN filers, and S corp owners. We rebuilt their site as a hand coded multi page property with a FastAPI plus SQLite blog backend, Calendly scheduling, and full schema. The site ships with cred strip v5, /admin/ documentation, secured nginx blocks, and the 11 framework SEO stack we apply to every client. Handled is also the test bed for the answer engine optimization stack we ship to other tax firms. handledtax.com is live.
What ships on that property: Calendly book widget, phone obfuscation plus honeypot, testimonials, /admin/ blog publishing for the firm owner, and the AEO snippets that show up in ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews when someone asks about ITIN, S corp, or RSU and ESPP filing.
Other case studiesWhat a tax firm AI build costs.
The $397 Full Visibility Stack is the right baseline for any firm that wants to show up in answer engines for tax questions in their geography. See all pricing.
Buyer questions, tax firm specific.
Are you actually compliant with IRS Circular 230?
That AI Guy is a software studio, not a tax preparer. We do not prepare returns. We build the technology a Circular 230 covered preparer uses. The preparer remains responsible for the work product. We design intake, retrieval, and drafting tools that surface citations to source publications so the preparer can verify before signing.
Can the AI hallucinate a tax position?
Properly architected Retrieval Augmented Generation does not invent rules. It cites the IRS publication, state code, or firm memo it drew from and the preparer reviews the citation. We build with that constraint and we test for hallucination explicitly.
Does the AI integrate with Drake, Lacerte, UltraTax, or ProConnect?
We have shipped pipelines that read from and write to those systems via supported import and export paths plus secure file transfer. Direct API integration is preparer software vendor specific and we scope it case by case.
Do clients trust an AI to receive their tax documents?
Document intake stays inside your environment. We do not send client tax documents to public LLM APIs without explicit consent and a Data Processing Agreement. For sensitive workflows we deploy local models or private inference endpoints.
What about IRS audit defense?
The audit defense AI assists the preparer drafting IDR responses and 30 day letter rebuttals. The preparer reviews and signs the response. The AI does not communicate with IRS personnel directly.
Other verticals we ship to.
Real estate
Listing pipelines, CMA generators, neighborhood guides, lead routing.
Construction
Quote pipelines, scheduling, project galleries, customer portals.
Hospitality
Direct booking, channel management, guest comms automation.
Combat sports
Class booking, member portals, video library, kids program intake.
Medical
Patient portals, HIPAA aware intake, multi physician scheduling.
Insurance
Quote pipelines, agent CRM, lead routing, policy RAG.
E commerce
Storefronts, inventory automation, AI product search, support RAG.