april plugs IRS transcripts into advisor planning workflows

Tax planning software has become one of the fastest-rising categories in the advisor stack, and april's expansion of its Integrated Tax Platform—giving advisory firms access to client-authorized IRS transcripts—is a move aimed squarely at the platform arms race.

The New York-based company, which bills itself as an embedded tax platform for wealth management firms, said Thursday the expansion combines client-authorized IRS transcript data with its proprietary tax engine to surface planning opportunities such as Roth conversions, concentrated stock positions, and estimated tax payments. Advisors can now pull historical tax data into onboarding, financial planning, and ongoing client management, eliminating the ask for paper returns and raising the bar for RIAs that still collect them by hand. The integrated platform launched earlier this year; the new data feed turns it into a year-round planning tool rather than a tax-season filing utility.

april is not a tinkerer: its tax engine has filed more than 1.4 million federal and state tax returns in 2026 and holds full IRS e-file authorization, a status limited to a small number of providers and a barrier to entry that rivals cannot easily clear. The engine already powers tax filings for Robinhood and Savvy Wealth, according to InvestmentNews, which matters because the pitch is about embedding tax into a firm's daily machinery rather than selling a one-off tool. "For many American families, gathering and sharing tax information with a financial advisor can be a frustrating, time-consuming process," co-founder and CEO Ben Borodach said, while president and COO Raj Doshi framed the shift as moving taxes from an 'annual, retrospective compliance event' to a 'year-round planning opportunity.' The practical effect for RIAs is tax data becoming a continuous planning feed instead of an annual scramble.

Advisor use of tax planning software climbed to 52.53% in the 2026 T3/Inside Information Software Survey, up more than 11 percentage points over three years and the second-largest gain of any category the survey tracks, trailing only estate planning tools. April claims it is the only company to combine large-scale tax preparation with AI-powered tax planning around equity compensation, concentrated stock positions, and Roth conversions—a claim that is hard to verify but whose positioning is clear: april wants to be the embedded tax layer for wealth management rather than a point tool.

Wealth platforms have been buying the software and services layer around the advisor, and tax workflows look like the next acquisition target. If platforms see the same math, april could be acquired rather than built: the filing volume gives it scale, and the IRS data feed gives it strategic value as the connective tissue between a firm and its clients. As this publication has argued, the race to own product factories now runs through tax data, and that is exactly the kind of asset platforms are paying for.