Efficiency Unleashed: AI Tools and Tax Professionals

The field of taxation is undergoing a transformative revolution with the integration of Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools. Tax professionals, tasked with navigating complex regulations and ever-evolving financial landscapes, are finding AI to be a powerful ally in streamlining their workflows, improving accuracy, and providing valuable insights to clients. In this article, we will explore how AI tools can be useful in various aspects of tax professionals' work, ultimately contributing to increased efficiency and effectiveness.

Drafting Assistance:

AI-powered document review tools like 'Legal Robot' and 'BriefCatch' can help tax professionals ensure legal soundness and readability in drafted documents.

Drafting documents such as client communications, tax opinions, notice replies, communication with various authorities sometimes require a specific format or template. Finding the same or creating the one can be time-consuming. AI tools like ChatGPT can assist in generating drafts, offering language suggestions, and ensuring that communications are clear and concise.

Time Saving by summarizing lengthy documents:

Emerging tools like 'Perplexity AI Docs', 'Humata.ai', and 'Genei' allow professionals to not only summarize but also query large legal documents and research papers interactively, providing instant citations and references.

As Tax Professionals, we often come across many lengthy documents including legal texts, circulars, notifications, notices, articles, guiding manuals etc. It is sometimes very tedious as well as time taking process between pressure of various deadlines to read them in full and draw conclusions from the same.

AI is here to help us. AI Tools like ChatPDF, ASKyour PDF, and OpenAI provides us a platform where we can upload any document from our side and within seconds, these tools summarize them for us. We also can find any particular point or text from a lengthy document. These tools will quickly search through the document and show us the exact location and page number where the concerned point or piece of information is situated.

Empowering Excel:

Microsoft's new 'Copilot for Excel' integrates advanced AI capabilities directly into Excel, offering data trend analysis, predictive insights, and automated financial modeling. Tools like 'SheetAI' and 'MonkeyLearn' can automate even deeper analytics within spreadsheets.

Excel is an integral part of our daily professional toolkit. Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools can be incredibly helpful in Excel by automating repetitive tasks, improving data analysis, and enhancing overall productivity.

AI can assist in cleaning and formatting data, ensuring consistency and accuracy.

AI tools can analyze data and automatically generate suitable charts and graphs in Excel. This feature saves time and ensures that data visualizations are generated quickly and accurately.

AI tools like “FormulaDOG” can suggest relevant formulas based on the context of the data in Excel. This helps users, especially those less familiar with advanced formulas, to perform complex calculations efficiently.

AI tools like “DataRobot” recognize patterns in data and automatically suggest or fill in data series, saving users’ time when dealing with repetitive data structures.

AI-enhanced filtering and sorting functionalities can help users by quickly identifying specific data points or trends within a large dataset, streamlining the data analysis process.

Recently, in the latest version of Excel, Microsoft office has added the “add-in AI aid tool” into excel itself to provide all AI related facilities at one point without the need of any other outsider AI tool.

Transcription/ Summarization of Videos, Calls, Conferences, web meetings etc:

Alongside Otter.ai, tools like 'Fireflies.ai' and 'Fathom AI' offer AI-powered meeting recording, transcription, and action item extraction, making post-meeting follow-ups more efficient for professionals.

There are many AI tools which provide AI-driven transcription services. “Otter.ai” is one of them. Otter.ai is the platform which utilizes advanced speech recognition and natural language processing technologies to transcribe conversations, meetings, interviews, and other spoken content. It can also make available Summary or Notes of Important points discussed in any online meeting, call, video conference etc.

We professionals attend such video meetings or webinars every now and then, so tools like this will be very beneficial for us. We can quickly get a short summary of a long technical webinar and save it for future reference.

Quick Answers to Queries:

AI-based tax compliance platforms such as 'Avalara', 'ClearTax AI', and 'Thomson Reuters ONESOURCE AI' are now widely used for real-time tax computations, GST validations, and automated return filings. Cloud-based practice management software like 'Zoho Practice', 'Karbon', and 'Canopy' also integrate AI modules for workflow automation and client communication management.

Tax professionals often encounter specific questions while working on client cases. ChatGPT and other AI tools can provide quick answers to queries related to tax planning, deductions, tax credits, and other tax-related topics.

However, it is important to note that though AI can be a useful tool, it should not replace the expertise and judgment of tax professionals. It's always essential to verify information, apply some Due Diligence and consult with experts in the field while dealing with critical tax matters.

Thus, by leveraging AI into their daily working tools, tax professionals can enhance their efficiency, accuracy, and ability to provide valuable insights to clients in an ever-evolving regulatory landscape. Embracing these technologies will not only save the time and improve the client experience but also position tax professionals at the forefront of innovation in the financial industry.

-CA TARJANI JAGRUTKUMAR ANJARIA