April Introduces AI-Powered Tax Planning, Prep for Advisors 

Move over Altruist, there’s a new AI-powered tax tool in town.

Wealthtech firm April is expanding its tax planning platform into the wealth management space, giving financial advisors real-time tax insights and enabling an efficient filing process that can be outsourced or led by a firm’s own CPAs. The capabilities, April execs say, help turn once-tedious tax work into a source of growth for RIAs. 

April President Raj Doshi and CEO Ben Borodach, who previewed the tools for Advisor Upside, said most wealth management firms want to deliver tax analysis. Many have struggled to scale tax capabilities from scratch, however, resulting in a rush of tax-focused acquisitions. Tech entrepreneurs, in turn, see an opportunity to help more advisors meet the moment without requiring capital-intensive acquisitions and time-consuming integrations.

“We are giving advisors a way to offer high-touch tax services,” Borodach said, noting the platform is fully auditable. “What we are doing is novel in that we’re bringing advisors a truly deterministic calculation engine for tax planning and prep. We can explain to every client exactly how we arrived at a given recommendation or filing decision, whether that’s how to unwind a concentrated stock position or how to handle a big inheritance.” 

Bringing It All Together 

Isolating tax services into a “separate, opaque workflow” can impede client service, Doshi argued. “Our platform is built so financial advisors, tax professionals and clients can all work from the same source of truth — documents, deadlines, payments and insights — brought together on a dashboard designed for wealth management firms.”

Particularly powerful, Borodach and Doshi said, is the ability to run simulations of key events, including equity compensation payouts, sales of concentrated stock positions, and Roth conversions. Advisors can deliver outsized results for clients with savvy tax moves such as: 

• Carefully timed Roth conversions, according to Ed Slott & Co., which can generate tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars in added after-tax wealth for affluent retirees.
• Systematic loss harvesting and smarter portfolio transitions, shown by Parametric Portfolio Associates research to boost after-tax returns by 1% to 2% annually.

“These kinds of services have been offered at the high-end of wealth management for a long time, but the tedious work of doing it all by hand has prevented advisors from delivering advanced tax planning to their broader base of clients,” Doshi said. “This launch changes what’s possible.” 

Serious Time Savings. CPAs already using April’s tax engine have found it reduces the time needed to prepare client tax returns by about 50%. 

“The typical CPA firm that has embraced our tools did so because they could barely keep up with the work of filling and filing 1040 tax returns,” Borodach said. “If you take away all that manual work, you can redeploy your experienced experts into higher-value, strategic planning tasks that let you actually elevate and differentiate your offering.”