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AI tools for Australian tax agents, sorted by job

Research, bookkeeping, workpapers, review, practice management and outsourcing. Which products do which job for an Australian practice, and where each stops.

  • AI
  • Software
  • Practice
An office desk in early evening light with an open laptop showing many browser tabs, a fanned stack of printed brochures, a notepad with a short handwritten list and a cup of tea, all text out of focus.

It's a Wednesday in August and the partner has given herself one evening to sort out "the AI question" before next season. There are eleven tabs open. The brochures from the conference are fanned out beside the laptop, along with one that came in the post.

Every homepage says roughly the same thing. AI-powered. Built for accountants. Save hours. By the sixth tab she can't remember which one did what, and the notepad has a list of product names with no verbs next to them.

The trouble is that "AI tax software" covers at least six different jobs, and a product that does one of them usually doesn't do the others. Comparing a research tool with a receipt scanner gets you nowhere, however good both are.

So here is the list sorted by job. Under each one: products sold to Australian practices, who each suits, and where it stops. Everything said about another company's product comes from that company's own website, linked inline and listed at the end with the date we checked it. We build one of these tools, and it appears in exactly one section. Our guide to AI tax software in Australia splits the market into four kinds of product. This post goes by the hour of work you want back.

Six cream trays in a row, each holding a small navy and coral object: a magnifying glass, a crumpled receipt, a grid, a tick, a calendar and two small figures.
Six jobs, sold under one label. Work out which tray your problem is in before you compare anything.

Research: answering a question about the law

CCH iKnowConnect from Wolters Kluwer is a tax and legal research platform with AI question-and-answer, a chat assistant and summaries. Wolters Kluwer says the answers are grounded in CCH iKnowConnect content tailored to your subscription, with citations, and that summaries work on that content only. If your practice already reads CCH commentary, this is the version of it you can ask a question.

Checkpoint Australia from Thomson Reuters offers commentary on how Australian tax, accounting and superannuation law applies in practice, linked to the legislation, rulings and cases behind it, along with toolkits, checklists and templates. Its Australian product page doesn't describe an AI assistant for Checkpoint, so if that's the feature you're after, ask them directly.

Who these suit: a practice whose slow hours are technical questions. A partner fielding trust and structuring questions from three seniors will get more from a good research tool than from anything else on this list.

Where they stop: at the answer. Someone still has to take it back to the client's file and apply it to the figures.

Document capture and bookkeeping

Dext lets clients send receipts, invoices and statements by mobile app, email or bank feed. Dext says its AI pulls out supplier details, dates and line items, and that your practice can set review and approval steps before anything is published to the accounting software, Xero and QuickBooks among them. Its AI Assist feature learns how your practice codes things and applies that across clients, and you review what it applied.

Xero's JAX runs bank reconciliation, transaction categorisation and bill and receipt capture in the background, and keeps GST and BAS figures up to date. Xero describes it as built for the business and its advisers, with the same audit trail visible to both.

MYOB has Iris, its AI built into the accounting software, and an AI BAS feature (in beta, for its Lite and Pro customers) that flags missing receipts and unusual GST and shows how ready a business is to lodge. MYOB's own FAQ on the page says the AI can still get things wrong, which is a sentence more vendors should print.

HelloBooks describes itself as AI-native bookkeeping for small businesses, accountants and finance teams, with a multi-client dashboard and bulk AI operations for firms. It lists Australian BAS and STP Phase 2 under country compliance.

Who these suit: practices that do the books as well as the tax, and practices whose clients are already on Xero or MYOB. If half your hours go on chasing and coding bank lines, start here.

Where they stop: at a clean ledger. The year-end workpaper, the judgement about what each figure is, and everything a reviewer checks all come after the ledger, and none of these tools claims to do that part.

Workpaper and return preparation

Xero Tax prepares and lodges returns for individuals, companies, partnerships, trusts and SMSFs, including for clients whose books aren't on Xero. It prefills clients' income and deductions in individual returns and imports trial balance amounts from a client's Xero organisation. Xero Workpapers sits alongside it. The Xero Tax page doesn't describe AI features. It's here because it's where a return actually gets prepared and lodged.

Tax in MYOB Practice Compliance prepares and lodges individual, company, partnership and trust returns and activity statements, prefilling and validating data with the ATO and pulling data from MYOB client files. MYOB puts workpapers in a separate Client Accounting product.

CCH iFirm includes Tax, Workpapers and CGT Reporter among its compliance apps. Wolters Kluwer says CCH iFirm Workpapers comes from the makers of the CCH Master Tax Guide, with workpapers updated every year by its tax experts, pulling general ledger balances from iFirm, Xero, MYOB or APS, and rolling forward last year's settings.

BeforeMay, which is us, does one piece of this. It reads a client's source documents (bank and brokerage statements, receipts, invoices, a trial balance), drafts a review-ready Excel workpaper with live formulas, and links each figure to the page it came from. Anything it can't settle comes back to you as a question. Here is what it does not do:

  • It does not lodge anything. You lodge through the tax software you already use, which is one of the three above for most practices.
  • It gives no tax advice. A registered agent at your practice reviews the workpaper and signs.
  • It is not a ledger. There are no bank feeds and no bookkeeping.
  • The workbook is in our format, not your firm's template.
  • Individual returns are where it is strongest. Company and trust workpapers are available by invitation and need more of your review, as the FAQ says.

Who suits what: if your clients are mostly on Xero or MYOB with clean books, the trial balance import in your tax software may be all the help you need, and a separate drafting tool adds little. A tool like ours earns its place when the file arrives as a pile of documents: a rental with forty pages of agent statements, a client with three bank accounts and a shoebox, a share portfolio with a year of contract notes.

Three rounded blocks side by side in cream, navy and coral, shaped like a stack of papers, a spreadsheet grid and a form, with a small gap between each.
Most practices end up with one tool per stage. The seams between them are where things get lost, so ask how each one hands over.

Review and QA

Taxpartna describes itself as an AI quality assurance tool for Australian firms that reviews tax workpapers before sign-off. It runs automated checks across the file and flags potential issues for your professional assessment, on areas such as trust distributions, Division 7A, CGT and franking accounts, and points out where a client conversation may be needed. It is in beta. It says plainly that it provides no tax advice or tax agent services and that the professional judgement stays with the practitioner.

Some of the review job is workflow. CCH iFirm Workpapers, per its own page, lets partners and reviewers see a file's progress, its due dates and who is reviewing it.

Who these suit: a practice where the partner is the bottleneck and every file waits for her. A second pair of eyes that runs before she opens the file can move the easy catches earlier.

Where they stop: a check finds the problems it was built to look for. It can't know about the statement the client never sent, or that the client mentioned a second property on the phone in March.

Practice management, and the advice beside it

Xero Practice Manager, part of Xero Partner Hub, tracks jobs, assigns staff and manages deadlines with templates for tax, BAS and advisory work, and logs time to WIP and invoices.

CCH iFirm includes practice management apps for AML, analytics, a client portal, a document vault, practice management and signatures, alongside the compliance apps mentioned above.

FYI automates document and practice management for accounting firms in Australia, New Zealand and the UK: storing documents, managing clients and tasks, and scheduling recurring work.

Two products sit next door, on the advice side. ChangeGPS offers tax planning, year-end bundles that automate FBT, trust distribution and dividend statements, an AML product, and AI through Access Evo that can search the ATO and Fair Work websites without leaving the software. Tax Fitness is advisory software for tax planning, an opportunities dashboard and business benchmarking, with live data from Xero, MYOB and QuickBooks.

Who these suit: any practice past about five people that is still running the season from a spreadsheet and an inbox. And if the real goal is more advisory work rather than faster compliance, the advice tools are a better place to spend than anything in the workpaper section.

Where they stop: they organise the work and the advice. None of them prepares the file.

Outsourcing: the option that isn't software

TOA Global supplies Australian-trained outsourced accountants based in the Philippines, presented as an extension of your firm. It says they can prepare individual and company returns, BAS and IAS, and work in Xero and the ATO portal.

Who it suits: a practice with steady volume and a senior who has time to brief, answer questions and review. Someone at the other end can also pick up the phone, or ask why a figure looks wrong. No piece of software on this list does that.

Where it stops: in the same place software does. The file comes back to your office, and someone who knows the client reviews it before it goes out. We set out what outsourcing really costs, including the briefing and the overnight questions, on outsourcing tax returns in Australia.

What none of them changes

A thick printed file lying open under a desk lamp at night, a fountain pen across the page, a coral sticky flag at its edge, a mug and folded reading glasses beside it.
Whatever drafted the file, the review and the signature stay at your desk.

The TPB's guidance on AI says the same thing at more length, and it doesn't stop you using a tool. You verify what it produced, you apply your own judgement, and you can show afterwards that you did. We went through what the TPB's AI guidance asks of a practice section by section.

That gives you one test that works across every section of this post. Whatever the tool does, can the person signing see what it did? Where a figure came from, what was decided and by whom, what is still open. A research answer with citations passes, and so does a ledger with an audit trail or a workpaper where every number links to its page. A finished file with no working fails, however good it looks.

Back to the notepad, then. Six jobs, and most practices need tools for two or three of them, not all six. Pick the hour that hurts most, find the section it belongs in, and compare the products in that section only. The FAQ covers where client documents go with us and what we don't do, and our category guide has the questions worth asking any vendor before you put a client's file through it.

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