Use cases

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 drafting, and ITIN ready intake, running on a federation that never sends a client return to an outside model. Built by an engineer who has shipped to a real CPA firm in Northwest Arkansas.

Tax season runs on paper, panic, and copy paste

Most tax firm pain is data entry, document chasing, and answering the same client question fifty times. The IRS publishes the rules in plain text. Clients send PDFs, photos, screenshots, and texts. The gap between those two ends is where a private federation earns its keep.

Every tax firm we have worked with 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. A federation fixes all four when it is built into the workflow you already run, not bolted on as a separate product with its own login.

Manual document intake

W2s, 1099s, K1s, receipts, and ID documents arrive in every format. Staff retype them into the prep system by hand.

Repetitive client questions

Where do I send my W2. What is the extension deadline. Do I qualify for a deduction. The same handful of questions, every week of the season.

Compliance research that takes hours

Multi state apportionment, credits, ITIN procedure, audit defense memos. Each one means reading several IRS publications end to end.

After hours phone load

Calls during family dinners during peak season. No firm scales that way for long.

Sources: IRS Publication 17, IRS Section 199A guidance, IRS ITIN program.

What runs inside your federation

Five capabilities that fit alongside your prep software

Intake

Document intake automation

Receipts, W2s, 1099s, K1s, and IDs extracted to structured fields, validated against IRS schemas, and routed into the prep system you already use.

Portal

Client portal assistant

Send me last year's return. What documents do you need from me. Answered in plain language, any time, with cited links to your own firm policy.

Retrieval

IRS publication retrieval

Staff query the entire IRS publication library plus state codes in plain English, grounded in your own copy of the source material, with citations every time.

Audit defense

Audit defense memo drafting

Past responses, form definitions, and current regulation feed a writing assistant for information document requests and thirty day letters.

Voice

After hours voice agent

The phone agent answers basic questions, schedules calls, and takes secure document drop offs, then escalates real emergencies.

Governance

Citations, not guesses

Every answer traces back to a source document in your own store, so the preparer can verify before anything is signed.

Why client tax data stays inside your own federation

A tax return carries a social security number, income history, and often a family's full financial picture. That is exactly the kind of record that should never be sent to a public model API just to get an answer about a filing deadline. In a private federation, the client portal assistant and the IRS publication retrieval both run on hardware you own, reading a document store that never leaves your environment. The preparer stays the one accountable for the work, and every citation the assistant produces points back to a source you can open and check.

Real work: 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 scheduling, secure intake, and full schema. The site is also the test bed for the answer engine optimization patterns we ship to other tax firms. handledtax.com is live.

What ships on that property: a scheduling widget, testimonials, blog publishing for the firm owner, and the answer engine optimization snippets that surface when someone asks about ITIN, S corp, or RSU and ESPP filing.

See systems already running

Tax firm FAQ

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 private federation a Circular 230 covered preparer uses. The preparer remains responsible for the work product.

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 before it goes anywhere.

Does the AI integrate with Drake, Lacerte, UltraTax, or ProConnect?

We have shipped pipelines that read from and write to those systems through 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 own federation. We do not send client tax documents to a public model API. The reasoning happens on hardware you own, so the documents never leave your environment to be understood.

What about IRS audit defense?

The audit defense assistant helps the preparer draft information document request responses and thirty day letter rebuttals. The preparer reviews and signs the response. The AI does not communicate with IRS personnel directly.

Other industries

Other verticals we ship to

Real estate

Begin

Should your firm run its own federation?

The readiness assessment answers exactly that, for your data and your goals, and ends with a real plan.

Start with an assessment Or start a conversation