AI Audit: a Pittsburgh-area CPA firm.

01 · Executive summary

Pain · Outcome · The opportunity at a glance.

Pain

Email triage during and after tax season, manual receipt and document entry into the bookkeeping stack, meeting-note rework before workpapers go in, and repeated client questions about deadlines and refund timing are consuming an estimated nine hours per week across the team — concentrated in partner and senior-staff time.

Outcome

Four off-the-shelf tools, installed in four working days at a combined cost of $82 per month, recover an estimated 8.5 hours per week of team time. None of the four require code, custom integration, or vendor onboarding longer than 60 minutes. Three of the four are SOC 2 Type II and one carries a data-handling caveat for client-confidential meetings (covered in Section 07).

02 · Impact-effort matrix

Where to start, and what to defer.

All bottlenecks surfaced in the discovery call, plotted by business impact and implementation effort. This audit focuses on the Quick Wins quadrant — high-impact, low-effort items where an off-the-shelf tool fixes the bottleneck without custom development. Major Projects are reserved for the upsell shortlist in Section 05.

03 · Prescribed tools

Four tools, ranked by hours saved.

Each prescription matches a specific bottleneck from Section 02. Cost, setup time, and weekly hours saved are conservative estimates based on what comparable firms have actually recovered after install. Implementation order is in Section 04.

04 · 4-day quick-start plan

One tool per day, about ten minutes each.

Implementation order is chosen for highest hours-saved-per-minute-of-setup. Do these in order. Don't skip days. The full plan is four working days and recovers all 8.5 hours per week by Friday.

1. Day 1 · Mon
   Install SaneBox across all partner mailboxes.

   Go to sanebox.com, sign in with Gmail or Microsoft 365, accept default folder rules. Done in under 10 minutes per mailbox. Recovers ~3 hours/week starting Tuesday.

2. Day 2 · Tue
   Install Fathom on each partner's Zoom and Google Meet.

   Authorize calendar access, enable auto-join for client meetings. Run a 5-minute test call with a colleague to confirm transcription. Recovers ~2 hours/week starting with the first real client meeting.

3. Day 3 · Wed
   Set up Dext and connect to QuickBooks Online.

   Create Dext account, install mobile app for receipt capture, configure email-forward address, connect to QBO. Train one staff member on the workflow. Recovers ~2.5 hours/week within a billing cycle.

4. Day 4 · Thu
   Record the first four Loom FAQ videos + draft FAQ doc in Claude.

   Block 90 minutes. Record Looms on: extension deadlines, refund-status lookup, required intake docs, fee structure. Draft companion FAQ doc in Claude. Embed in TaxDome client portal. Save remaining four videos for Day 8. Recovers ~1 hour/week within two weeks.

05 · What comes after quick wins

Three bigger fish, ranked.

These came up during the discovery call but fell in the Major Projects quadrant — high-impact, high-effort. Worth revisiting after the four quick wins are in place and the team has bandwidth for a real implementation. Listed in order of ROI.

1. Private LLM for client-confidential document search.

   An on-premise or VPC-isolated language model trained on your firm's accumulated workpapers, client correspondence, prior-year returns, and engagement letters. Partners and seniors ask natural-language questions ("did we make a 481(a) adjustment for this client in 2024?") and get cited answers. Client data never leaves your network. Eliminates the 4–6 hours per partner per week currently spent on archive archaeology.

   Estimated engagement: 4–6 weeks · Proof of Concept tier ($25K–$60K)

2. TaxDome workflow automation across intake → return → delivery.

   The repetitive sequence that runs ~500 times each tax season — intake form → document request → reminder cadence → review queue → e-sign → delivery — can be automated end-to-end inside TaxDome with custom workflows and webhook integrations. Recovers roughly 90 seconds per return, which at 500 returns is 12.5 hours per season just on coordination overhead.

   Estimated engagement: 2–3 weeks · Two-Week Deep Discovery tier ($7,500)

3. Client onboarding agent for new-client intake.

   A trained chatbot or scheduled email sequence that walks new clients through document collection, engagement-letter signing, and first-appointment scheduling without requiring partner time. Especially valuable in Q1 when new-client volume spikes. Built on top of TaxDome or as a standalone agent depending on integration constraints.

   Estimated engagement: 3–4 weeks · Proof of Concept tier ($25K–$45K)

06 · Financial impact

The number that justifies the audit.

Recovered hours valued at a blended internal rate of $165 per hour — partner and senior-staff billable time, weighted by where the time is actually being lost. Conservative; if you measure against client billing rates the number is roughly double.

On a one-time audit fee of $1,995, payback is reached in approximately ten business days after implementation. Annualized recovered value at the blended rate is approximately $71,870 against a combined annual tool cost of approximately $984.

07 · Data-handling notes

What leaves your network, and what doesn't.

For a CPA practice, client confidentiality is the gating constraint on every AI tool. Below is the data-handling stance for each prescribed tool, written so you can hand this section directly to outside counsel or an IT review without modification.

Tools we considered and did not recommend

• Otter.ai — Functionally similar to Fathom but historically weaker on data-handling guarantees for paid tiers; their data-use opt-out is less clear and a recent policy change broadened use of customer audio for model training. We'd rather you use Fathom under the caveat above.
• Generic "AI bookkeeping" SaaS marketed to CPAs — A class of tools ranging from $99 to $500 per month making AI-categorization claims that, on inspection, are just rules-based categorization with marketing on top. Dext does the only part that's actually working.
• ChatGPT Team / Enterprise for client correspondence drafting — Not because the tool is bad, but because the per-seat cost ($25/user/mo) outweighs the recovered hours at your team size and use case. Revisit if the firm grows past 30 staff.

08 · Next steps

Implement. Verify. Then decide on the bigger fish.

1. Implement the four quick wins this week. Follow the 4-day plan in Section 04. About 10–15 minutes per day per person doing the install.
2. Track hours saved for 30 days. A simple spreadsheet — who, what task, how long it used to take, how long it takes now. Conservative is fine; the guarantee math is forgiving.
3. Schedule the 30-day check-in call. 30 minutes with Marc or Scott. We review what landed, what didn't, and decide whether any of Section 05's bigger items belongs on the next quarter's roadmap. If the 5-hours-per-week threshold wasn't met, the audit fee is refunded on this call.
4. Decide on the bigger fish. If a Section 05 item is the right next move, we'll quote it then. If it isn't, you keep saving 8.5 hours a week with the four tools you already installed, and we wish you well.

— End of deliverable —