Friday, January 24, 2025
Top 4 AI Prompts For Tax Pros in 2025
Today's Topic: Best Prompts For Tax Pros Part 1
If there's one takeaway from this email series, it is to use one of the AI chats like ChatGPT in your practice this tax season.
Your team can get started instantly, automate all sorts of tasks, and it takes almost no investment.
And once you get going, you'll keep finding more areas where it can help you. It's like a muscle. Nowadays, I use ChatGPT 10-15x daily for personal and professional tasks.
NOTE: before using AI chats on client data, make sure to black out PII and turn off resharing in the settings of ChatGPT. We recommend ChatGPT Team for the highest security standards. Then, make sure to get consent from your client in advance - this can be a clause in your engagement letter or contract.
Before we get into the list, let's go over some things to cushion the prompts with to give you the best results...
How to improve your prompts
Some say prompting will be a university class taught in the future... Well, in my opinion, you don't need a class. It's pretty simple:
- Start with an identity ("You're a CPA with 20 years of experience")
- Give it full context relevant to the prompt (files and URLs work too)
- End with "keep it concise" so it doesn't ramble
- Be clear on the output you want (they can generate graphs, images too)
- Be pesky. Iterate on your response. Ask it to do it again.
- Copy paste your best prompts in a prompt repo
- Make a GPT out of your most common use cases (will cover this in future)
And of course use your expertise and judgement on all the responses. At the end of the day, you're the professional. Not the AI. It's just a tool.
So don't just copy-paste the prompts below into Chat. Make sure you add the elements I mentioned above first.
The Prompts
#1: {Feed in client's current return and past return as PDF} Generate a custom report outline to present a client's year-over-year changes in tax savings, suggesting strategies to gain more savings next year.
Toni's Take: this is one of the most powerful prompts you can use as a tax preparer. It can be modified in a lot of ways. Maybe you feed in the past 5 years of tax returns and ask it to identify long term trends that can be used to help with tax planning. In general, you can use AI to help with analysis. The biggest mistake I used to make was using AI like Google, instead of like an expert virtual assistant. Give it tons of info and ask the hardest questions you can.
#2: {Feed in P&L, tax return or other financial statements you have} Based on this client’s income and expense patterns, recommend 3 changes they can make to maximize tax savings for next year.
Toni's Take: if you do CAS, this might be better to ask after the tax season. It can be a great way to start upselling clients into advisory services.
#3: Write a concise guide to help clients understand what triggers a tax audit and how to avoid red flags.
Toni's Take: Make sure you tailor this to your practice and your clients. Feed in examples of things you've seen in the past. You can take the output and stick it in an email, a page on your website, or ask it for a script instead to then record and post on social media.
#4: Give me a step-by-step email communications plan for my clients ranging from {current date} to end of the tax season.
Toni's Take: Use this prompt as more of a starting point. It can help you get a plan in place as to how/when to communicate with clients. It can help with drafting emails for deadline reminders or keeping your team on track. It's better to overcommunicate with clients during filing season, anyway. You can even drop the deadlines you have to keep in mind into your calendar or pre-schedule the emails now, before things get super busy.
I hope these were useful. Any of them can be modified and stretched. Please keep us posted on what prompts you use and which you come up with - we can share them with the other tax pros in our community!
Happy prompting 💻🤓
P.S. this email series is by CleanUpBuddy.ai, which helps you turn a tangle of bank statements into a clean P&L in under a minute using AI.
It's great for those Schedule C clients without clean books. You know who I'm talking about. Feel free to check out our siteto see how we can help you reclaim hours of manual work this tax rush without outsourcing or hiring.
We also invite you to join our Discourse community for other bookkeepers & tax pros using CleanUpBuddy here. We'll add more content there as well as announce events, special promos, and more.
Thanks for tuning in, happy to help with any questions. Just drop a reply.
Touch base next week,
~Toni, CEO of CleanUpBuddy.ai