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The bank-to-books bookkeeping engine, two-track onboarding, the time and invoicing engine, and AI-proposed time
This release fills in the operational spine. A client can connect their bank, watch the transactions flow in, get categorized by your rules plus the on-prem model, and tie out, with your corrections teaching the system as you go. Onboarding now adapts fully to whether an engagement is Tax or Finance/Accounting. The billing page became a proper workspace, time tracking works the way a firm actually tracks it, invoicing automates the busywork, and the OS will even propose your time entries from your day of email. Everything stays gated by your approval, the AI runs on open models on hardware you own, and your data never touches a third-party AI service.
Bank to books, end to end
The bookkeeping loop the interview walked through, now wired together.
- →Clients connect their bank in the portal (or you connect it for them); transactions stream in automatically.
- →Your self-learning bank rules apply first, then the on-prem model categorizes the rest; low-confidence items land in Approvals.
- →Review and correct categories in a transactions workbench (single or bulk), and your correction trains a reusable rule, so the same vendor is right next time.
- →No bank feed? Upload a bank-statement PDF or CSV and it extracts the transactions and runs them through the same categorization; it learns each statement format, so the next upload from that bank is instant.
- →Every transaction shows how it was categorized (your rule, a firm rule, the shared vendor library, or the AI), and categorization keeps getting sharper across your whole book the more you confirm.
- →Reconciliation ties out against the period, recurring charges are detected, and approved categories sync to QuickBooks.
Onboarding, now two clean tracks
Tax and Finance/Accounting are fully separate, end to end.
- →Two engagement-letter templates and two onboarding-question sets, one for Tax and one for Finance/Accounting, both editable in Settings and picked automatically by the engagement track.
- →Two ways to run the onboarding questions, your choice per client: fill them in yourself (over the phone or from what you know) or send the client a secure link to complete. Either way the answers populate the client record the same.
- →The prior-year-return step runs on the Tax track only; Finance/Accounting skips it and you build its request list directly.
- →The prospect card is a guided walk-through that advances in order and keeps you in the loop: send or fill the questionnaire (you're notified the moment the client submits and the step turns green), then Max drafts the quote, you review and approve, then the engagement letter, which you preview and edit (the letter and the email both) before it goes for signature, and signing converts the prospect into a client with their portal, request list, and full intake (entity type, contact details, and the tax facts) already on file.
- →Re-engaging a client for a new year reuses their record and portal and offers the same fill-or-send questions on the right track, with its own re-engagement email.
- →Clients are tagged by track so you can sort and filter your book of business.
The time and invoicing engine
Time tracked the way a firm actually tracks it, and invoicing that runs itself.
- →Time codes to project then task, with leave types (PTO, sick, bereavement, holiday, training) entered separately and kept non-billable.
- →Holiday schedules by team (onshore and offshore differ), a US-holiday preset, configurable time rounding, and everyone can view anyone's timesheet read-only.
- →The billing page is now a workspace: an overview with live KPIs, plus Time, WIP, Invoices, and a Reports view (billable utilization, revenue vs cost and margin, realization, time audit, client trend, and a per-manager portfolio).
- →Per-client billing cadence with monthly auto-draft from approved time, suggested write-downs for your review, fixed-fee and retainer billing, and routing to QuickBooks or to your personal-tax workflow.
- →Quotes and Invoices are separate workspaces. Quotes is where Max takes the first pass at a fee (a predictive estimate from your rate card, the prior-year return's complexity on tax, and comparable clients in the same industry and revenue band) that you edit freely, including overriding the final number outright when a job doesn't fit the formula, then export to Excel and send for approval. Invoices is the live billing side: what's owed, reminders, paid and void.
- →Step-up verification before an invoice is pushed out, so the money action is always deliberate.
Agents that know more and do more
Max and Ed get sharper context, and a new agent gives you back time.
- →AI-proposed time: the OS reads your day of email, drafts the time entries for the small tasks that usually go unbilled, and queues them for you to accept or tweak.
- →Point Max or Ed at a client with @: in Ask Max or any team channel, type @ and pick a client from the list, and their full context (notes, documents, transcripts, prior messages) feeds the answer or Ed's draft. No guessing who you meant.
- →Your internal notes, transcripts, questionnaire answers, and prior messages are all part of a client's context now, and your notes reach Max, not just Ed.
- →Documents keep real versions: a corrected re-upload chains as a new version instead of orphaning the old one, and a fixed classification re-matches its request item.
Fixes & improvements
- •The on-prem model no longer stalls the workflow: a slow generation falls back gracefully instead of blocking, so converts, drafts, and categorization stay responsive.
- •Client portal messages send instantly; the summarizing and drafting happen in the background.
- •Ed always leaves a reply draft on an inbound client message (editable), even when the model is busy.
- •Clicking a client-message notification opens the conversation in Communications, not the client's general page.
- •Requesting a document now kicks off the follow-up cadence automatically as a reviewable reminder.
- •Inbox and transcripts can be deleted; unmatched documents show their best-guess client.
- •The predictive fee estimate label is honest about how it learns, and it now records predicted vs actual at invoice time to calibrate over time.