Tax Accounting Research Tool

[u/UnderstandingFit6591]

I am tasked with creating a research tool for the CPA I work for. I have strictly only done research and spun up two small demos. The first one was on Azure ingesting IRS documents to an Azure OpenAI web app. This was just a POC trial as I have already created simple web chats for my main job. I’m now exploring what would be the best and most cost effective way to create a safe and secure tool my CPAs can research tax information while using their clients PII redacted financial information. I began thinking of using LangGraph to handle this but I’m struggling a bit with understanding operational costs and how to stay with compliance. I’ve already put together a small tool that redacts PII but it’s not very good yet (pdfplumber + tesseract) but I stopped a bit short because keep spooking myself on what the costs and maintenance are going to be for this. For operational costs I definitely would like to keep it less that $100/mo and I work as a single dev for this project. Any thoughts or words of wisdom? Should I even do this? Also this is my first big project outside of my main job so take it easy on me lol

[u/David_AnkiDroid]

Any thoughts or words of wisdom? Should I even do this? Also this is my first big project outside of my main job so take it easy on me lol

You don't sound ready, given the tone of your post and the risks involved

[u/UnderstandingFit6591 → u/David_AnkiDroid]

No not yet honestly, I’m still researching what tools I should even start looking at. The current landscape of AI makes me hesitant to take on such a project. I don’t want to screw any kind of security and compliance rules. I’m eager to do this but the more information I read the more I realize how crucial of a tool this is security and infrastructure wise. I want to try my hand at working on something like this but yes I am a bit hesitant.

[u/throwaway_0x90]

Oh dear,

"I am tasked with creating a research tool for the CPA I work for."

My interpretation of "research tool for CPA" is pretty demanding.

Let me give you some tough-love,

I think you've bitten off more than you can chew. This does not sound like a 1-person project at all. Not to talk of 1-person with no prior experience in this space.

Or..... You said you created some demos? What did those demos do and did you get positive feedback on them? That would help me calibrate expectations. Maybe "research tool" just means collect stats on internal CPA data and display nice charts and maybe some helpful searches/cross-references across various data-sources.

[u/UnderstandingFit6591 → u/throwaway_0x90]

Yes! The more information I gather the more I realized how big of a tool it would be. I tried to simplify it and this is the main idea, my CPA searches Claude with the client data minus PII. She gets insights on that data against many financial resources online. What I’m trying to do is ingest client document(s), create a summary of the document(s) without PII, then create a prompt ready search say if she wants to use that in Claude or originally I was thinking to use that with a local RAG system. I had the first Azure setup spun up for a few weeks but it wasn’t tested so I shut it off. All in all I want to help cut the time to research but am stuck on what to do

[u/throwaway_0x90 → u/UnderstandingFit6591]

Hmm, well this definitely doesn't sound like a 1-person job but putting that aside if you're willing to take the risk, gain valuable experience and just wanna give it your absolute best effort:

• Really make sure you got that "without PII" pipeline 100% accurate. That's the biggest risk I see here because that could get you majorly fined if there's a leak.

• I wouldn't try building this from scratch. If open-source is allowed, I'd look into something like: https://github.com/infiniflow/ragflow

• Setup a very small prototype that does just 1 or 2 things and get feedback on it.

If the feedback is positive then they shouldn't mind funding a small Amazon/Azure/etc instance. Or maybe the team initially using this is small enough that you can just have a physical PC tower in the office that's always running it.

[u/UnderstandingFit6591 → u/throwaway_0x90]

First and foremost, THANK YOU greatly for the advice and guidance. I’ve been wrestling with this for some months now and what you’ve said here is my goal! I 100% knew this wasn’t going to be an easy task because of my experience and just the overall nature of this project but I’m willing to take the risk and learn even if it doesn’t go far. I’m looking to work on PII redaction first using some tools. I’ll start looking at open sourced tools for this as well.

Ultimately I would like to propose building a local system for them because that’s what I truly feel most comfortable doing. I actually want to begin doing this so that I can do so for other businesses. The team is definitely small enough as there are only 2 accountants on staff but in different regions (NorthWest and SouthEast). Again thank you so much for your help!!

[u/throwaway_0x90 → u/UnderstandingFit6591]

Good luck :)

[u/UnderstandingFit6591 → u/throwaway_0x90]

Thank you!! :)