Embedded AI tax platform april has launched a new integrated tax platform built specifically for wealth management and advisory firms.
The platform purports to give advisors a real-time view into client tax workflows, documents and insights while enabling a more efficient filing process.
“Advisory firms are looking for ways to deliver high-quality tax analysis without building or scaling a tax practice from scratch,” said Ben Borodach, co-founder and CEO of april. “By making our AI-driven tax engine available to wealth management firms, we are giving advisors a way to offer high-touch tax services, while maintaining a clear line of sight into every calculation, and surfacing new planning conversations from that work.”
The platform is built on april’s nationally chartered, AI-powered tax engine, originally created to help financial advisors stay in the loop while offering clients a fully managed, hands-off tax filing experience in which april’s U.S.-based, credentialed tax professionals prepared and filed the return. The new tool aims to provide advisor visibility, via an integrated dashboard, and practice management capabilities year-round, in addition to tax preparation during filing season.
Firms get access to features like dynamic auto-fill and AI that extracts and prefills data from uploaded documents—either provided by the client or directly from the IRS as an authorized e-file provider. Calculation tools can run precise tax simulations for key financial events, such as equity compensation, purchases or sales of concentrated stock positions, Roth conversions and estimated payments.
All of this information can be organized into a single, polished client deliverable summary that highlights where the clients’ tax position stands in relation to their financial position, including recommendations for individual actionable steps and the ability to highlight notable calculations.
It’s this embedding of tax considerations into financial decisions that underpins much of what April is trying to accomplish. “Taxes shouldn’t sit in a separate, opaque workflow,” says Raj Doshi, april’s President and COO.
The goal, according to Doshi, is to move beyond the existing systems of individualized point solutions to offer a single, comprehensive solution in a single box.
That said, the creators of april’s tax platform recognize that not all wealth-management professionals will need or even want every aspect it can offer, so while all of the functionality is available through a single dashboard, firms can pay for things on a more a la carte basis—for instance, a firm with no interest in actually preparing and filing a return, but more concerned with the ability to calculate and plan the tax implications of certain moves on a given client’s plan, can purchase access to the tax engine without having to pay for services they won’t use, which will simply be locked out on the dashboard to be activated if/when needed.
Though exact examples weren’t given, Borodach explained that they are pricing based on utilization and usage rather than preparation volume.
According to Doshi, “Our platform is built so advisors, tax professionals and clients can all work from the same source of truth—documents, deadlines, payments and insights, inside an environment designed for wealth management firms.”
