Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Welcome to Basic Business AI, a podcast dedicated to simple AI strategies for businesses who don't want to get an advanced tech degree or hire some marketing bro. I'm your host, Josh Thomas. You can find me on all social media. T literally. We bring on regular business owners, just like you and me to discuss practical strategies and perspectives about AI without getting too far into the weeds. BB AI is sponsored by Annabots. And what you can do with Anabots is increase your speed to lead from 47 hours, which is the average time it takes for a business to get back to someone, down to just five to seven seconds. That means that you're going to close more deals and keep happy customers. You can learn more about Anabots by going to Anabots AI. Once again, that's Anabots AI. Today's guest is Ankur Patel. Angkor is the COO of automated tax credits.com Ankur, welcome to Basic Business AI and your perspective.
What is, how is AI reshaping the future of your industry?
[00:01:05] Speaker B: Hey, Josh, thank you for having us.
Yeah, so in our industry is the accounting industry and finance industry. So most, most likely people are calling it kind of like fintech type of situation here, but we're more focused on automating an AI simple applications that regular CPAs do, tax lawyers do, and different things like that. What we found in this industry is that it takes a lot of time to do a lot of just logical type of work, meaning you got A plus B and that C. What we want to do is it takes on a CPA or an accountant extreme hours, like 45 to an hour to actually complete that simple math problem. A lot of it's math in accounting in our industry, you know, you're taking numbers here and you're adding it here and you're getting, you're getting an outcome here. What we're able to do is leverage that AI in with AI and be able to go in and say, okay, let the computer do the work, because they can do something that's taking an hour and 30 minutes and 45 seconds. So it's very interesting that we're able to leverage our products and different technologies that we have here now and being able to allow accountants or any financial advisors, whatever it may be, to be able to leverage a product like this currently. Yeah, sorry, go on.
[00:02:36] Speaker A: Well, I'm just going to say that there's several benefits there to multiple parties because it benefits the end consumer, because you get your answers faster, it benefits the accountant because they can work more efficiently, and it benefits everyone because it allows you to save labor costs, probably offer a service at a lower expense and probably increase the accuracy because you're not introducing so much human error.
[00:03:05] Speaker B: Exactly. And to your point right now, in the accounting specific industry, they'd only have so many hours a day to take on so many x amount of clients. Right. And that's problematic because when we, when we deal with like lead generations and they're taking in leads, they cannot handle the capacity of the amount of need for accountants are out there. You know, most of them, if you guys are familiar with your own accountants, they're very book solid, especially during tax season. So what we're doing is we're able to build custom different opportunities for accountants in ways where one, we're giving them everything they need, they can access it faster and just simplified manner and that'll allow them to gain more clients, you know, get more time out of the day for themselves. And all of those things that you're.
[00:04:00] Speaker A: Saying, what, what are some impacts that, that AI has already had on your industry at this point? Have you seen any cosmic shifts in the way that people operate or the way that people run their business because of AI?
[00:04:15] Speaker B: So in our industry it's a little bit backwards. I mean this is very new for AI to come into this industry. And one of the things that we are doing at Automated Tax credit is we have this tax credit that's out there from 2021 and it's called the SCT Self Employed Tax Credit. It's the official name on the IRS is called Credit for Sick and Family leave. But the rest of the world knows it as SCTC. And what we did here is in 2021, during COVID time, they had a tax credit that came out for self employed people. You know, you're either 1099 worker, independent contractor, you have a small business, you're a single member llc, all of those sorts, right? And they said hey it, you know, if you miss some time off of work due to Covid related issues, you are actually available for a tax credit. Now it's interesting because this tax credit came after the 2021. So what we're doing is essentially amending tax returns. So a lot of accountants, it's, it's a little bit above their, their grade. It's like a whole nother form that they learned. There's a lot of different things with us. We've created an application that automates the whole process for anybody. So even direct to consumers or even if an accountant wants to sign up with us, they can leverage our product and establishing Their own clients. What that did was in 2021, we're able to amend that tax return that they had, telling the irs, hey, you know what? You guys got this tax credit that's for it. Supposed to be for 2021. I never received it. I, I want to apply. You know, the ending of application for this is next year of April 15, 2025, end of the tax year.
But we, we noticed that the struggle was that the accountants were taking about one and a half hours to two hours to do each application. And the amount of demand for this tax credit is increasing. There's about over 50 million people that are eligible for this tax credit. Yeah, yeah.
[00:06:24] Speaker A: I'm not, I'm not a math genius, but that sounds like a lot of hours. Anchor.
[00:06:29] Speaker B: Exactly. And, and so we're like, okay, we need to go in and we need to build something that allows this. So we did two things in, in our first step, we built something and it was a little bit archaic where we, we tested out with some CPAs and we had them, you know, figure out the forms, fill out the forms and everything like that. On top of that, the clients would have to upload their tax documents. See, we're amending the 2021 tax documents, and you can stop me if I'm going more into debt. I'm trying to simplify it as easy as possible. So we're getting clients to upload stuff, and then we have to call them back. They're not uploading the right stuff. So we actually figured out a tool that we're able to. Now they just give us consent because we're accounting firm, and now we don't even need them to upload any documents. Now we're able to go ahead and get it directly from the irs. So it's very seamless for them, and it takes away any error, any human error, any type of callback, any pushback, any time constraint. The second.
[00:07:35] Speaker A: That's. That's one of the most important things that I think that we need to really drive home about AI is there's. There are certain things that humans are just always going to be better at. Empathy, discernment, judgment calls, those sorts of things. But when it comes down to crunching numbers and submitting forms, machine's going to beat the person every time.
[00:07:58] Speaker B: Oh, yeah. And, you know, as a, as an individual, like even my own small businesses that I own, I'm just like sitting there and I don't want to do this number stuff. I. It's. And I am.
[00:08:09] Speaker A: And you're a Numbers guy and I.
[00:08:11] Speaker B: Have a fear of making a mistake and, and having a problem. So, you know, we have these people that are doing it. The problem is they're taking forever. But going back to this one, that was our first problem that we solved. So we saw that right away now, now the client doesn't need to upload any documents. The second one is we're getting so many leads in like in one month. We got a thousand deals coming in and it was fluctuated because our team could not handle that. So we developed an AI tool that was. Once the documents are received by us, we're able to create those forms directly for them, have all their signature, have all their Social Security, their information. It's a fully working product. And all we do is just send it out and the IRS receives it right off the bat. So we took something that took two hours to make. We had an AI tool go in, analyze their tax documents that we got automatically from the IRS now. And we pulled it, created the amendments and all the documents that needed for this tax credit. And people were getting up to, you can get up to $32,200 for this tax credit. So it's a big relief that we did for self employed individuals at that, at this time.
[00:09:23] Speaker A: And you as an accountant, you don't have to spend two hours completing this form. How long does it actually take you to just monitor the process and make sure it's executed properly?
[00:09:33] Speaker B: Oh, it's, it's fully automated. So I am not an accountant, Josh, but our CPAs, now we just do audit control. So we have CPAs that go in and check it, but it's, we have a 99 success rate. You know, the only time there's an error is like there's this part in the, in the document that asks you get days for kids that are missed. Right. So if, let's say you don't have kids, but you try to claim that you have kids, then the audit comes in and they're like, hey, no, you don't have kids.
[00:10:03] Speaker A: You don't, don't lie to the government. They will find out.
[00:10:06] Speaker B: Yeah, they're gonna find out 100%. But other than that, it's full force and it's doing really well at this time, you know.
[00:10:13] Speaker A: Awesome. So, Ankur, where can we go to learn more about this and submit for our tax credits?
[00:10:19] Speaker B: Yeah, so Our website is www.automatedtaxcredits.com and right there you find all the information of the sctc.
The application ends April of next year. So you do have a little bit of time. It does take up to like 16 weeks for you to get your refund back, but the process is fully automated. Within 15 days, you'll know your official calculated refund amount and everything like that.
[00:10:47] Speaker A: Awesome. Hey, we're going to wrap up from here. Thanks so much to our guest Angkor Patel, for coming on and sharing some practical wisdom about how we're using AI to automate your accounting process and hooking directly into the irs. For those of you who are interested in learning more to see if you qualify for this tax credit, you can go to automated tax credits.com and if you run a business of any size or you have some ideas or strategies around the topic of AI, we'd love to have you on a future episode. We interview all kinds of business owners, especially those of us who are not trying to be tech geniuses. You can apply for a future episode by going to basicbusinessai.com and one more time, if you want to install 24.7ai sales and support team for less than 10% of the cost of an employee, get yourself an Anabot. You can learn more at Anabots AI. We'll see you next time here on Basic Business AI. And hey, if you like this episode, tell your friends. See you later.
