Financial Services · persona
CPA Firm
3-50 staff CPA practice. Tax season + monthly close + advisory. Most work moves on email and shared drives. PBC chase is a sport.
A day in the life
What the next Tuesday looks like
It's mid-March. The partner is in client meetings until 2pm; she has 14 returns waiting on her review when she gets back to her desk. The senior is on her third PBC follow-up email of the day to a client who keeps promising the K-1s tomorrow. The admin is reformatting the same engagement letter for the fifth time because every client edits a different sentence. Two new prospects came in through the website yesterday, the contact form went to info@ and nobody has responded yet. The bookkeeping team is two days behind on a January close because QBO threw an error and nobody noticed for five days.
This is normal. It's also entirely the kind of work that doesn't need a human to do, only to approve.
The AI Operating Layer drafts the PBC chaser the moment the document is overdue, marks it sent the moment the file lands in the portal, and re-checks the document index nightly. It generates the engagement letter from the prospect's intake form (with the partner's preferred clauses), queues it for sign-off, and routes the signature to DocuSign. The two prospects from yesterday got an automated qualification message within 90 seconds and have already booked discovery calls. The QBO close error generated a Slack alert at 2am, with the suggested fix in the message.
Nothing was decided by AI. Every signature, every return review, every scope change still passes through a human. The humans just stopped doing the work that didn't need them.
The cpa firm playbook
The automations that matter most
Out of the full Financial Services catalog, these are the ones a cpa firm should run first.
Engagement letter generation
Client acquisition & onboarding
From the prospect's intake responses + selected service line, the system generates a fully populated engagement letter with the partner's preferred clauses, queues for sign-off, and routes to DocuSign.
PBC (prepared-by-client) document chaser
Document handling & PBC chase
From the open PBC list per engagement, the system sends scheduled chasers for any document overdue by N days, notes when documents arrive in the portal, updates the PBC list, and surfaces stuck-clients to the engagement lead.
Tax-season triage queue
Tax season surge mode
Every inbound email during surge season is auto-classified (PBC delivery / scope question / extension / clarifying / payment / urgent / other) and routed. Urgent goes to engagement lead within 5 minutes.
Bookkeeping anomaly detector
Bookkeeping & close
Surfaces unusual transactions (large amounts, unusual vendors, account changes), missing-receipt patterns, duplicate suspects, and reconciliation gaps before month-end review.
In the wild
How this actually plays out
Tax-season surge mode is the workflow that justifies the entire engagement for a CPA firm.
From February 1 through April 15 (and again Sept 1 through Oct 15), the firm operates in a different mode: every inbound email is potentially a missing 1099, every voicemail is potentially a panicking client, every PBC list has 8 outstanding items per client. The traditional answer is overtime. The AI answer is triage.
The surge-mode workflow:
• Every inbound email is auto-classified (PBC document delivery / scope question / extension request / clarifying question / payment / other) and routed. • Document deliveries are matched against the open PBC list per engagement; the list updates automatically; a status digest goes to the engagement lead each morning. • Anything tagged 'panicking' or 'urgent' is escalated to the engagement lead within 5 minutes. • Common clarifying questions ('do I need to amend last year?', 'can I deduct this?') are auto-replied with a templated answer + link to a partner-reviewed resource, never tax advice, always a structured pointer. • Extension drafts are generated and queued for partner sign-off the moment a return is flagged as 'won't make April 15'.
A typical 12-staff CPA firm running surge mode reduces partner inbox volume by 60-70%, shaves 6-9 hours/week of senior time on PBC chase, and finishes tax season with significantly less burnout.
Get the firm-shaped automation map
Tell us your firm size, primary practice areas, and the one cycle that breaks most often (tax season, renewals, quarter-end, surge intake). We'll come back with a written map of which 5-7 automations matter first, what compliance posture they require, and what the first 90 days would change.