June 17, 2026/#0001

The billing suite, onboarding tracks, predictive pricing, and AI workpapers

It's been a huge few weeks, so this one's a big one. Maxed runs on two AI agents (Max and Ed) plus an always-on back-office engine, and this release stacks a lot on top: a full time-to-invoice billing suite, onboarding that adapts to the engagement, predictive pricing, AI-drafted workpapers, deadline detection, and more. Here's everything that's new, with where it fits across the platform. Everything's gated by your approval, and the AI runs on open models on our own GPUs, so your data never touches a third-party AI service.

Your AI agents: Max, Ed, and the always-on engine

Maxed runs on two agents plus a back-office engine, not a dashboard with an AI button bolted on. Each one is tenant-isolated, audited, and gated.

→Max, the analyst you talk to (Cmd-J): answers from the actual text of your documents and meeting transcripts (never invents records), and takes actions behind a confirm card you approve, add a note, change a deadline, flip an engagement status, log a call, or make one change across many clients at once (assignment-scoped, deselect any, full audit trail).
→Ed, the communications agent: auto-drafts a reply the moment a client emails or messages the portal, chases missing documents on an escalating cadence (gentle to firm to urgent to partner), and sends from your firm's own mailbox once a staff member approves.
→The always-on engine: syncs email, bank feeds, books, calendars, and transcripts; classifies every incoming document and ticks it off the request list; applies your bank rules then AI-categorises the rest and flags anomalies; auto-advances engagements; posts a daily digest; and writes every approval to the training log Max learns from.

Win new clients: CRM to onboarding

From an inbound referral to a signed engagement letter, the pipeline runs itself and waits for your yes at each gate.

→Auto-detected prospects: an inbound email referral or an intro-call transcript becomes a prospect automatically, but sits in a confirm queue (with a Pipeline / Rejected toggle) until you accept it, rejecting trains the lead detector.
→Onboarding questionnaire: send a prospect a secure, single-use link (expires in 30 days) or fill it in over the phone; answers attach to the prospect and feed straight into the quote. Question sets and the invite email are firm-configurable.
→Quotes drafted from your rate card, grounded in the intro call, your notes, and the questionnaire answers, re-draftable with Max until a partner approves, which auto-emails the proposal. Convert in one move creates the client, engagement, quote, and a tailored document request list.
→Engagement letters generated in your firm's letter style and sent for e-signature in one click (once DocuSign is connected).

Onboarding, now tailored by track (NEW)

Adding a client starts with one front door that asks the engagement type and tailors everything to it, instead of a single generic intake.

→Tax collects filing details, last year's return, and a tax document checklist; Finance/Accounting asks bookkeeping questions (revenue, transaction volume, payroll, reporting cadence) and requests reports (P&L, balance sheet) instead of tax forms.
→Edit the onboarding questions before you send them, per prospect, or while filling them in yourself; configure each track's set firm-wide in Settings.
→Reading last year's return no longer times out, it parses in the background and fills the tailored request list when ready (a scanned/image-only return is flagged honestly rather than guessed).
→Opening the intake wizard from an existing client reuses that client instead of creating a duplicate.

Run the work: documents, chasing, and replies

Three channels feed one engine, and Ed handles the back-and-forth with your sign-off.

→Documents flow in via the portal, your upload, or the client emailing them, each is auto-classified, matched to the request-list item, and version-tracked (your manual fix always wins).
→Ed chases outstanding documents on a firm-wide cadence with quiet hours and blackout days, plus per-client sequences that override the default.
→A client message or email is matched to the client and Ed auto-drafts the reply into Approvals; you edit, approve and send (it posts to the portal thread first, then emails), or decline with a reason that trains the model.
→Internal team chat with access levels and a per-channel Ed-reading toggle (off and private channels never reach Ed or the training log).

Accounting and month-end close

The bookkeeping engine is live end to end, reading from your own connected books.

→Bank reconciliation, self-learning bank rules, and AI transaction categorisation on every sync; recurring-charge detection; and receipts read on arrival (merchant, amount, date extracted).
→Month-end close: a checklist Max auto-completes where it safely can (in the background), with a per-client cadence, an open-items list to clear before the close call, and a hard period lock on finalize.
→Financial reports, Trial Balance, P&L, Balance Sheet, Journal Entries, Chart of Accounts, plus Accounts Payable (outstanding bills, due dates, aging) from your books.
→AI workpapers on a tax engagement: first-draft lead schedules, a year-over-year flux analysis with the big swings flagged, tie-out checks, and proposed adjusting entries, routed to Approvals (never auto-applied) and downloadable as a multi-sheet Excel workbook.

Price and bill: the time-to-invoice suite (NEW)

A full billing workspace that replaces the spreadsheet-and-Kantata shuffle, what used to take ~15 hours a month.

→Time approvals (single + bulk) before anything can bill; work-in-progress by client and task; draft an invoice from approved time, grouped by task and totals-only, reserved so nothing double-bills; optional AI write-down suggestions.
→Live reports you used to rebuild in Excel: billable utilization (PTO-aware, with onshore/offshore work calendars), revenue vs. cost and margin, realization, a time audit, client trend, and a per-manager portfolio overview, plus a 13-week cash forecast from bank history.
→Per-client rate cards (standard / discounted / VIP / friends-&-family) applied automatically to quotes, WIP, and invoices; predictive fee estimates that give a low/expected/high range and cold-start with zero history.
→Schedule a rate change ahead of a date (e.g. 1/1/2027) and it applies automatically, work dated before keeps today's rates. Invoices: create, send, remind, mark paid / void / refund.

Automation that compounds (NEW)

Smaller agents that quietly remove manual steps.

→Deadline detection with dynamic cadence: a deadline mentioned in an email, chat, transcript, or note ("K-1s due June 15," "83(b) within 30 days") becomes a Confirm-deadline card, and once confirmed the follow-up cadence tightens as the date nears.
→Tell Max to change many clients at once in plain English, with one confirm card listing every affected client.
→Portal updates become notes: a client's plain-English update is summarised into a structured internal note + action items and the assigned staff are notified.
→A client's industry is auto-classified on conversion; freshly-onboarded engagements are flagged "Onboarding" until they're caught up.

Approvals, team, and security

One queue for everything the AI proposes, and the controls a firm needs.

→Approvals queue: Ed replies, document classifications, follow-ups, categorisations, anomaly flags, confirm-deadline cards, engagement sign-offs (with Max's return summary on the card), and close items, assignment-aware, bulk-clearable, with partner-set auto-approve thresholds for small-dollar bookkeeping noise.
→Roles + a partner-editable permission matrix (who can read/edit each area), mandatory 2FA for staff and clients with recovery codes and step-up on high-risk actions, and a partner can now reset a teammate's or a client's 2FA.
→Team management: invite staff, set rates and cost/hour, assign clients, deactivate/reactivate. Sessions slide while you work and hard-cap at 30 days.
→Your data lives in Postgres with row-level tenant isolation; a partner can export the whole firm's data, and certified deletion runs on a 30-day SLA.

Integrations, honest by design

The integrations panel shows only the connectors your firm controls, and a connector is never marked live until a real test passes.

→Paste your own keys and Test: DocuSign, Calendly. Operator-configured with a Test button: Microsoft 365 Mail + Calendar, QuickBooks.
→QuickBooks is connected firm-side and mapped to each client (connecting kicks off a background transaction sync); clients connect their own bank (Plaid) from the portal, or you do it for them.
→Client emails (invites, questionnaires, re-engagement) send from your firm's own address once your firm email identity is set.

Fixes & improvements

•Test that mail is actually flowing: Settings → Integrations → Microsoft 365 has a read-only "Test, show recent emails" button, and Sync now reports real counts.
•Clients can connect and disconnect their own bank from the portal Settings (the stuck disconnect + a spurious "contact your CPA" message are fixed).
•Plainer one-line "what this does" descriptions atop each page; the Time & Quotes tabs and sidebar no longer double up labels.
•AI quote drafting no longer errors for firms that edited their rates, and the proposal email on approval now actually sends.
•A brand-new client with nothing synced shows an honest empty state instead of a dead form; ineligible-for-close clients get a specific reason.