Soraban reposted this
We're entering the golden age of tax software. Seriously. There's a LOT of money going into tax automation. But only ONE category of tax tool is a no-brainer for accounting firms. The video you're seeing is a sponsored demo I put together for Soraban. It's good, a whopping 16k accountants have seen it, but first 👇 Let's make sure we understand the 7 types of tax software available to tax firms: 1. Intake These apps produce pro-forma document request lists (not boilerplate questionnaires), and provide a place for you and/or your clients to submit every individual item needed. 2. Workpaper Prep They organize and annotate docs to tie to the tax software. Traditionally done in some combination of Adobe Acrobat and Excel. 3. Input The automated input of data off of tax forms into your tax software. We've long had OCR solutions for this, they just weren't accurate enough to trust. Now AI can much more accurately pull data, but integrating with tax software remains extremely clunky. 4. Form Prep This is your tax software. It's old, it's bad, and better alternatives can't come soon enough. Efficiency with tax software largely boils down to muscle memory. If you're considering a change, efficiency gains are better found in the other tool types presented here. 5. Review These apps review a 1040 given a pile of supporting documentation. While the future of this category is super exciting, capability here are still limited. 6. Delivery The ability to ingest a completed tax return, and deliver it to the client while giving them clear to-do's and gathering all necessary signatures. A modernized, app-ified transmittal letter. 7. Research Using AI to get you to answers quicker, and double check the work of your humans. These are getting really good, but so is ChatGPT at a fraction of the cost. Most tax workflow apps are tackling several of these. For example Soraban started with Intake, and is now getting into Input and Deliver. But with so many platforms on the market and each doing slightly different things, it can be VERY hard to know what's going to save you the most time and headache. Here's my take: Intake (1) offers the greatest time savings opportunity. I can vouch for hundreds of firms who have spent the past two years using AI intake software to automate info collection. It's real, and it works. Next I see firms getting the most time savings from Deliver (6), and Research (7) platforms... But the no-brainer buy right now for tax shops: It's an Intake (1) solution. And Soraban (shown in the video) is as good as any Intake solution on the market. It's been around a few years now and I can happily recommend it to anyone ready to save a pile of time next tax season. If you haven't seen intake apps before, check out the video and you'll become a believer. PS. I've got some free resources to share if you're re-evaluating your tech stack over the next couple months. Drop me a 👋 in the comments and I'll send em over.