Every time tax season used to roll around, Montréal’s Nima Jalalvandi said it brought him nothing but stress. As the go-to person who did taxes for his family and friends, Jalalvandi said it was like “spring cleaning, with none of the benefits.”
Jalalvandi and his co-founders have responded by building Ready Plan Go, an artificial intelligence (AI) platform that aims to automate the grunt paperwork for accountants and let them spend more time giving clients tax and financial-planning advice.
“We want to increase satisfaction so accountants feel they can do meaningful work.”
Nima Jalalvandi, Ready Plan Go
Ready Plan Go calls its software an “AI-powered back office” for tax preparers. It’s meant to speed up document collection, data extraction from digital documents, and tax software form entry.
“We want to increase satisfaction so accountants feel they can do meaningful work, by creating the infrastructure layer of the back office for tax prep,” Jalalvandi said in an interview with BetaKit.
After going through accelerator programs Station FinTech Montréal and Next AI, Ready Plan Go nabbed two awards at Startupfest worth $175,000, including the 2SLGBTQIA+ Prize and the FinTech grant. The early-stage company has now rounded this out to a $750,000 pre-seed round, including a cheque from Mistral Venture Partners and 15 angel investors from Montréal’s startup ecosystem. These include Stay22 CEO Andrew Lockhead and Firat Gezen, the former president of General Dynamics Canada. Some of the money came from the sale of Jalalvandi’s own house.
Ready Plan Go’s business model partly depends on acquiring the books of tax firms with accountants leaving the business or retiring. The company is first targeting United States firms because they have larger client bases, and it recently landed its first large client in Pennsylvania.
RELATED: AI bookkeeping startup Ceedar is turning customers into investors
Jalalvandi said the money will be used to buy more business and work on product development. The four-person team consists of two founders with a business background and two chartered professional accountants.
While the AI platform is designed to replace some of the work of accountants, Jalalvandi claimed it’s only reducing the workload of a shrinking workforce. The accounting industry is at the precipice of a broad transformation, as more than 80 percent of licensed professionals are expected to retire within the next decade, and there are fewer young people joining the profession. An April 2024 survey conducted by the firm Robert Half found that 90 percent of finance and accounting hiring managers already face challenges due to a labour shortage.
Jalalvandi sees the lack of accountants as an opportunity for firms to integrate Ready Plan Go’s tech. The online platform has AI agents completing multiple stages of the tax preparation process, as well as connecting to exterior filing platforms such as Drake and ProSeries.
“There will be a human there to make sure context is always there,” Jalalvandi added.
Some research into AI in accounting has found it useful in speeding up tedious “pre-work,” such as classifying transactions and compiling client information. According to a Stanford University survey of 277 accountants across 79 firms in the US, accountants using AI served more clients, finalized monthly statements a week earlier, and spent less time on back-office processing tasks. However, the same survey found that 62 percent of accountants worried about AI-generated errors, and 43 percent were concerned about data security when using AI.
Jalalvandi explained that customers of the firms it partners with will have to consent to sharing their data with these AI models. He added that the company is working on getting SOC 2 certification, a widely used security compliance framework.
Ready Plan Go also uses a mix of large language models (LLMs) to make sure that tasks are completed with maximum accuracy. Jalalvandi gave the example of extracting text from PDF documents—if multiple LLMs don’t score 100 percent accuracy, then the system pings a human to review the documents. “Ninety-nine percent is not enough,” he said.
Feature image courtesy Ready Plan Go.