TaxStatus, a provider of IRS-sourced financial data for financial advisors and CPAs, has unveiled Planning Observations, a new capability that automatically identifies advisory opportunities and advice gaps from a client’s own tax records.
Planning Observations transforms raw IRS data and information returns into a prioritized, client-ready roadmap of planning conversations, work that has traditionally required hours of line-by-line manual review for every client and prospect, the company said in a media release on June 30.
Planning Observations powers the company’s redesigned Financial Baseline report, a consolidated, client-facing deliverable that compiles a household’s complete financial picture and flags the items that warrant a conversation with their advisory team—all drawn directly from source documents such as IRS data and Forms 1099, W-2, 1065, 1120, 5498, K-1, and more.
By automating the discovery step, Planning Observations lets advisors and CPAs:
- Reclaim hundreds of hours otherwise spent on manual analysis across their book of business.
- Surface advice opportunities proactively—including time-sensitive items tied to recent life events—rather than discovering them after a deadline has passed.
- Close advice gaps by systematically catching the planning issues that manual review routinely misses.
- Improve the quality and consistency of advice with a standardized, discipline-by-discipline review applied equally to every client and prospect.
- Win and deepen relationships by walking into every meeting with a data-backed agenda drawn from the client’s actual records.
Planning Observations evaluates each client’s records against more than 175 distinct observations across six advisory disciplines—financial planning, investment management, tax planning, estate planning, insurance, and banking and lending—and detects nearly 50 multiyear life events—from a job change, business sale, or home purchase to retirement, inheritance, or the onset of long-term care. Each observation is mapped to a specific, defensible advice opportunity the professional can act on, TaxStatus says.
“Planning Observations do in moments what used to take a team days or weeks per household,” Kevin Knull, CEO of TaxStatus, said in a statement. “We’re not replacing the advisor’s judgment—we’re handing them an efficient analysis so they can spend their time advising clients instead of hunting through data. For a firm with hundreds of clients, that’s thousands of hours given back and a measurable lift in the quality and timeliness of the advice they deliver.”
According to TaxStatus, Planning Observations doesn’t use artificial intelligence. Every observation “is the product of deterministic, rules-based logic engineered from deep tax and financial-planning domain expertise and validated against the millions of real tax records TaxStatus has on file. Because the logic is rules-based and explainable rather than generative, every observation is transparent, repeatable, and traceable to the specific data that triggered it—giving professionals results they can stand behind with clients and regulators alike,” the company said.
“This is only possible because of a combination of two things competitors don’t have: deep, hard-won domain knowledge across advisory disciplines, and millions of actual tax records to build and validate against,” Knull added. “That combination is what lets us deliver precision without guesswork—and without AI.”
Planning Observations and the new Financial Baseline report are available now to TaxStatus users. More information can be found here.
Photo caption: TaxStatus CEO Kevin Knull
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Tags: Advisory, tax advisory, TaxStatus, Technology
