Accounting
Avalara debuts “Avi” chatbot for natural language queries
Tax compliance solutions provider
Avi is trained on Avalara’s custom knowledge base and is constantly learning and improving. It can be used to answer product questions, such as “how do I add a new tax return to my account,” and will provide step by step instructions to do so. It can also answer more general questions like whether or not Colorado requires people to register for local taxes. Avalara noted, though, that it cannot answer questions pertaining to the specific user, as it does not have access to their account information, and so it won’t answer questions like “how many sales did I make last month.”
Avi can also be used to help troubleshoot common product issues, as well as help users find additional resources where needed.
“Avalara has been leveraging AI and automation inside our business for years to improve the way we work and deliver products to market,” said Jayme Fishman, chief strategy and product officer at Avalara. “We are excited to bring the power of AI externally and make it accessible to our customers and partners who are able to leverage self-serve solutions to problems and, when needed, turning to our human support teams to support more complex scenarios.”
While Avalara had released a plugin for ChatGPT (when OpenAI supported them), this product is different in that the plugin was trained on a data set of information that Avalara makes public regardless of whether the user is a customer while this data set is for their users so as to make interacting with our platform easier. Therefore, it has some additional content they did not expose in the plugin, according to Fishman in a later email.
Fishman said the model was developed based on best of breed AI models (specifically Open AI GPT Large Language Model) in combination with the very large amount of tax compliance resources Avalara has. Avi immediately leverages updates to these knowledge sources. Given a user query, the relevant resources in the Avalara Knowledge Base represents “What to say”, and the LLM is the part of the system that knows “How to say it.” Fishman also said that it has guardrail training to safeguard against bad actors and unprofessional prompts.
Avalara’s Avi is free for users both in their knowledge center and in their products.
H&R Block has given the world just what it wants to see this holiday season:
Santa has a lot of itemizations to consider. Eight tiny reindeer depend on him for food and shelter, for instance, but are they dependents? How much can you give to one person before reporting it? Does Santa keep good mileage records for his 41.5 million miles? Santa isn’t an employee, so compensation (even in cookie form) over the threshold may create a 1099-NEC.
Old St. Nick, who files MFJ with Mrs. Claus, did all right on 1040 Line 34, but some of his numbers do bear examination: 6.3 million cookies and 2 million gallons of milk means a third of a gallon of milk per cookie. Will the deduction of coal, magic dust and sleighbells stand up to audit? At least Santa has plenty of time on his hands between January and April to find a good preparer.
“Even the jolly man in red takes time to report taxes,” reads the announcement from the tax prep giant. “He’s probably the world’s most famous small-business owner, running a gift-giving workshop and distribution network across the globe … Santa is giving us the first ever peek at his tax return and showing us how he used H&R Block Online and AI Tax Assist to get his maximum refund.”
The SECURE 2.0 Act contained several changes to traditional and Roth individual retirement accounts and 401(k) plans that are being phased in over the coming years, with several notable changes coming in 2025. The Illinois CPA Society highlighted five changes coming to IRAs and 401(k)s in 2025:
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