Tax-season document collection, ending in a draft email to the client and CPA

Situation

At tax time, an operations analyst handled each household by hand. The work meant visiting each custodian's website, finding every account and downloading the right forms while skipping monthly and wrong-year documents. The analyst then renamed the files and listed the client's other accounts. Notes on each account for the tax preparer, and the email to the client and CPA, were also written by hand.

Solution

A desktop tool follows the same steps for each household. A search by last name gathers the household's accounts. The tool then downloads the forms and statements from the custodian and plan websites and names them consistently.

AI reads each account's forms and writes one to three plain sentences for the tax preparer. The notes cover distributions, IRA contributions, back-door Roth conversions, rollovers, inherited IRAs, and HSA and 529 activity. Charitable distributions and gifts of stock come from the operations team's own records, with set wording.

Last year's note appears beside each account, and accounts that existed last year but are missing now are flagged. The result is an email draft with the forms attached and a table of accounts and notes.

Design decisions

Jeff Hunt kept the AI's notes deliberately narrow. They include no fees, balances, holdings, performance or withholding amounts, no guesses about charitable distributions and no tax advice. Everything else follows fixed rules, and a person reviews every email before it is sent.

Outcome

The operations team can prepare each household's tax-season package from one draft, with the forms, account notes and email to the client and CPA already assembled. Accounts that have disappeared since last year are identified before anything reaches the client or the CPA.