Free calculator
How many returns is your team leaving on the table next season?
Automated document intake, extraction and return pre-fill cut prep time per return by about 40%. That freed time is capacity — returns your current team could file without a single seasonal hire. Move the sliders.
Added capacity revenue per season
$126k
from 180 additional returns your current team could file — 18 more per preparer, no new hires
960 h
of prep time freed per season — chasing, classifying, extracting, populating
+180
returns added at a conservative 45% realization rate — the engine’s benchmark is 3×
Where the hours actually go
Review time alone: 3.5h drops to ~20 min per return — roughly 1,900h saved across the season, on top of the capacity number above, not counted inside it.
Uses the published benchmarks from our CPA & Tax Engine: 40% less prep time per return and a 94% pre-fill rate, with the realization rate modelled conservatively and scaled to your current prep time and staffing. Methodology below — your firm’s real number depends on return mix, and the audit maps it.
Get this breakdown for your firm — before next season
We’ll send your numbers with the full methodology, plus how document chasing, extraction, return pre-fill and review each change — on the tax software you already run.
Methodology
The math, in the open
No black box. Prep hours are your returns multiplied by your average prep time; automation removes 40% of them (the published benchmark for automated intake, classification, extraction and pre-fill). That freed time only converts into added returns up to what your preparer headcount can actually absorb — beyond that, review and sign-off time, not prep, is the real constraint. Within that ceiling, the realization rate scales with how manual your process is today: firms with more prep hours per return have more room for automation to compress. Capacity revenue is simply the added returns at your average fee.
hours freed = returns × prep hours/return × 40% capacity ceiling = preparers × 200h (headcount limit before review/sign-off binds) realization rate = 45%, scaled to your prep hours vs. a 4h reference added returns = min(hours freed, capacity ceiling) ÷ (prep hours × 60%) × realization rate capacity revenue = added returns × average fee review hours saved = returns × (your review hours/return − 20 min) (added on top, not counted above)
With the defaults — a 10-preparer firm filing 600 returns at 4 prep hours and a $700 average fee — that is 180 additional returns and $126,000 in added capacity revenue per season: the same worked example published on our CPA & Tax Engine page. “Prep hours” is not one opaque number — it’s four stages, each shown in the calculator: documents pulled from your client portal automatically (no one chases them by hand), classified by type, extracted field-by-field with a verification pass, and pushed into your tax software as a 90–94% pre-filled return. The preparer starts from a punch-list, not a blank organizer. Review is the fifth stage and the most concrete one: a side-by-side dashboard that takes review from hours to minutes per return, shown separately so it’s never double-counted into the capacity number.
The fix
How firms capture the capacity
The service
CPA tax document automation
Document chasing, intake, classification and extraction automated end-to-end — 84% less manual client follow-up, 3× more documents processed per staff member.
The engine
The CPA & Tax Engine
Watch the full pipeline run: intake → classification → extraction → gap chasing → return population → CPA review, with every number this calculator uses.
Your stack
Built on your tax software
UltraTax CS, CCH Axcess, Drake, Lacerte, ProConnect — the pre-filled return lands in the software your preparers already use. No migration.
FAQ
Tax-season capacity, answered
Where do the 40% and 3× benchmarks come from?
Both are published benchmarks from Filed, an AI tax-document automation platform, cited on our CPA & Tax Engine page: roughly 40% less prep time per return, and up to 3× busy-season capacity industry-wide. We don’t just borrow the number — a 12-person CPA firm we automated hit similar territory first-hand: tax-season overtime hours cut from 312 to 189 (39%), admin time down roughly 40%, document collection dropping from 47 days to 16. The calculator never assumes the 3× ceiling — it models a conservative realization rate that scales with how manual your current process is, so the business case never depends on a best-case number.
Does this include review time, or just prep?
Both, shown separately. Prep — document chasing, classification, data entry and population — drives the capacity number above. Review is modelled on its own: with a side-by-side dashboard where every extracted value links to its source document, CPA review typically drops from 3–4 hours to 15–25 minutes per return. That review-time saving is real and shown in the calculator, but it’s added on top of the capacity number, never folded into it — which keeps the headline conservative rather than double-counted.
We are a small firm — does the math still hold?
Yes, with one deliberate constraint built in: the calculator caps how much of the freed prep time your current headcount can realistically absorb before review and sign-off — not prep — becomes the bottleneck. At a firm with plenty of preparers relative to volume, that ceiling never binds and the math scales cleanly. At a small firm with high volume per preparer, the calculator will show your capacity gain leveling off — that is exactly the small-firm situation, where hiring seasonal staff is hardest, made visible in the number instead of hidden behind a flat percentage.
What does it take to actually capture this capacity?
The pipeline behind the numbers: client documents pulled automatically from your portal, classified by type (W-2s, 1099s, K-1s, brokerage composites), fields extracted and verified, and the return pre-filled in your existing tax software — UltraTax, CCH Axcess, Drake, Lacerte or ProConnect. Firms typically go live in 3–5 weeks, before season.
Is the data I enter here stored anywhere?
No — the sliders run entirely in your browser. We only receive your inputs if you choose to submit the form with your email, in which case we use them to prepare your breakdown.
Sometimes the hardest part is reaching out — but once you do, we'll make the rest easy.
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