Conversational Intake
NILA replaces the long organizer with a guided chat: life changes, income, deductions, prior-year confirmation, and a final catch-all. One question at a time, about eight to twelve exchanges, with progress saved automatically.
Your firm charges $300–$2,000 per return.
How much are you losing on intake?
Every hour your staff spends chasing documents, sending organizers, and decoding client emails is an hour you can't bill. NILA replaces your tax organizer with an AI conversation your clients will actually complete — in any language.
The real cost of manual intake
0+
staff hours lost (per tax season)
0
full workweeks burned
$0
in unbillable staff time
Industry analysis of mid-market CPA firms found the average firm loses 8 full workweeks per tax season — over 340 hours — just chasing client documents. One managing partner at a tax practitioners forum put it bluntly: “Only 340? We're probably closer to 500.”
That's highly trained staff doing work that requires zero tax expertise. It's the reason returns stall in the pipeline for weeks. It's the reason your best people are burning out by April.
Source: Mid-market CPA firm analysis, Mentally AI (November 2025).
How NILA works
Six steps. The first one takes a minute. NILA handles the rest.
Start Intake in 60 Seconds
Open the dashboard, add the client with name, email, and filing status. NILA creates an industry-standard checklist automatically and sends the client an invitation to upload their documents. That's it. You're done in under a minute.
Auto-Personalize from Prior Year
Want a sharper checklist? Drop in last year's text-based PDF documents and NILA refines the checklist with specifics — instead of asking for a generic '1099-DIV,' it asks for the '1099-DIV from Bank of America.' You can edit, remove, or waive items in one click before sending. NILA adapts to how your firm actually works.
Invite Client Instantly
Publish the checklist and NILA emails the client secure login credentials. On first login they set a new password and land in a clean, guided intake experience. No app downloads. No portal to figure out.
The Client Has Two Things Available
Once logged in, the client can do either or both — in whatever order works for them.
Chat with NILA (optional, takes 3 minutes)
NILA greets them by name and walks through life changes, income, deductions, and prior-year confirmation. One question at a time, in any language. They can pause and finish later — progress saves automatically.
Upload documents (required, fully flexible)
They upload against specific checklist items, drop files into a general bucket, or upload an entire zip of everything they have. NILA's AI identifies and classifies every document with a confidence score, so you know exactly what you're looking at.
Chat with NILA
Upload documents
Live Intake Intelligence
You don't wait for the client to finish. The Intake Results panel updates as they go — signals from the chat appear with confidence scores and exact client quotes, documents appear classified and matched to checklist rows, urgent flags surface to the top. Add to the checklist, mark optional, or update the entity profile in one click. The briefing builds itself in real time.
Return-Ready Briefing
When you're ready to start the return, the briefing is already done. No reading long emails. No decoding sticky notes. No discovering rentals on page 40. Everything is structured, sourced, and one click away.
No phone calls. No missing docs. No surprises.
Built for the intake conversation itself
Entity Discovery
When a client mentions a rental, side business, K-1, or change in household, NILA treats it as profile-level discovery — not a stray checkbox. You get action items with their exact words, including structured rental address capture when it applies.
Multilingual Support
Clients write in Spanish, Farsi, Tagalog, Hindi, Arabic, Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese, or any other language — including romanized scripts. NILA does not ask them to switch to English. Your briefing stays in English.
Year-Over-Year Intelligence
After a text-based prior-year PDF is uploaded, NILA seeds the conversation from last year’s profile. Instead of blank W-2 questions, NILA asks what changed — so clients feel recognized and you get a real year-over-year diff.
Smart Document Checklist
Uploads are classified, matched to checklist rows, and checked for tax year mismatches before you see them. Clients can mark “Doesn’t Apply to Me” when they are unsure, routing those lines to you for approval.
Never Gives Tax Advice
NILA gathers facts only. If someone asks for deductibility or filing strategy, NILA defers to you with a consistent, compliance-safe response — your authority stays intact.
Before and after
Without NILA
Send organizer → client half-fills it → chase 3 follow-up emails → decode messy answers → realize they have a rental you didn't know about → start over.
With NILA
Client opens a chat → AI guides them in their language → discovers the rental → builds the checklist → client uploads docs → you get a briefing with confidence scores and client quotes.
Don't take our word for it.
Spend 2 minutes as a client. See exactly what your clients would experience — in English, Spanish, or Farsi.
We'll email you a private demo link. No signup, no credit card.
Pricing that pays for itself in week one
Less than the cost of one staff hour per workday.
For most firms, NILA works out to roughly $10–$25 per client per year — less than what you spend chasing a single missing 1099 over email. Your firm charges $300–$2,000 per return; NILA costs a fraction of one return to handle intake for the entire client.
Flexible tiers designed for firms with 200 to 1,500+ clients. Book a call to discuss what fits your firm.
Book a call to discuss pricingThree bad options CPAs face today
Most firms still choose between paper organizers, digital form products, or a heavy practice suite where intake is one module among many. Those paths are familiar — but they all struggle with the same gaps when clients think in stories, not checkboxes, and when English is not their first language.
| Criterion | Paper organizers | Digital forms | Practice suites | NILA |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Approach | Static packets clients fill out on paper or PDF | Structured web forms with uploads | Broad platforms with intake as one module | Guided intake conversation plus checklist |
| Adapts to client responses | No | Limited conditional paths | Depends on configuration | Yes |
| Multilingual conversation | No | No | Usually English-first | Yes |
| Entity discovery | No | No | Not a core strength | Yes |
| Setup time | Low direct cost, high staff time | Template setup | Often a heavier rollout | Focused intake setup |
| Built specifically for intake | No | No | No | Yes |
The two things no competitor does well: any-language conversation, and entity discovery. Both are built into NILA by default.
What a mid-market firm can recover
~250 hours and ~$16,000 per season
Roughly 75% of document chasing eliminated • fewer late-discovered entities • faster return turnaround • your senior staff back on billable work, not nagging clients for W-2s