Wolters Kluwer Tax & Accounting unveiled CCH Axcess IQ, a system that uses artificial intelligence and predictive analytics to deliver the latest tax news and insights to affected clients, at its CCH Connections user conference in Miami Beach on Tuesday.
“At its core, it takes tax events and then it searches the data in CCH Axcess Tax for just those clients that the tax events impacts,” Jim McGinniss, EVP and GM, TAA, North America, Medium and Large segment, at Wolters Kluwer, told Accounting Today. “Then it packages it up in a way that you can learn more and connects with our CCH AnswerConnect, and in a way that you can communicate with your clients. It creates a client letter, and you can also customize that letter, or you can collect that information before you visit the client. Our goal is to take a tax event and turn it into a billable event.”
CCH Axcess iQ come with insights from the Tax Cuts and Job Act along with more recent 2018 legislative events. That includes coverage of the pass-through entity provisions, issues with interest income, research tax credits, and other topics in thousands of fields within CCH Axcess Tax.
“CCH Axcess IQ, I think, is a great example of predictive analytics and tools that allow us to bring those two things together in a way that’s never been done before,” Jason Marx, CEO of Wolters Kluwer Tax & Accounting, North America, told Accounting Today. “Now that customers can take advantage of legislative changes, you can connect that directly to what’s happening in their client base, and specifically identify the impacts. We’ve talked to firms that do this, and they have teams of people, and it takes weeks to start to do this. But this happens in minutes because the intelligence is able to identify the event and match it to the client’s specific information, and then produce information that the accountant can act on to drive value, to drive growth, to drive understanding.”
Wolters Kluwer plans to expand the system after the launch. “Our initial launch is pretty basic,” said McGinnis during a presentation Tuesday at the conference. “It starts with the federal tax events and it takes you to the clients. Because it’s a platform and because it all works together, we’ll be bringing in additional events beyond just tax. We’ll also have the opportunity for you to look at a client and see which events from all of those areas impact them. All of this is going to come. I’d also add the interactions with the clients are very important, being able to link into your CRM [customer relationship management system]. All of these things we can work on once we get it out there.”
He told Accounting Today how the company is using coding sessions known as Code Games to develop new technology, including links between CCH Axcess with Xero and QuickBooks Online. “We’ve really developed a culture of innovation here,” he said. “Some of the things you’re seeing today like the integration with Xero and QuickBooks for financial prep comes out of Code Games. We’ll take two days separately and have the team code like mad as quickly as they can on new ideas. Then we judge them and they ultimately go on to a global contest. We’re absolutely committed to making CCH Axcess the indispensable platform, so look for us to continue to build out the integrations, the way that the platform works together, the way that the data flows. And as a platform, look for us to continue to partner with others and to bring their data in to help accelerate our move to the cloud and to the platform.”
McGinnis foresees being able to provide information about tax relief from the IRS in response to disasters such as hurricanes to affected tax clients. “Going back to CCH Axcess IQ, these events have tax relevance,” he said. “There’s deadline changes, there’s various deductions and credits, depending on how things happen. How do you know if you have a client in the impacted zone? CCH Axcess IQ will identify the event. It will look at the data for the zip codes that are in there and it will tell you for the first time easily which of your clients should be notified of the impact of the hurricane or whatever the event is.”
