Outsourcing tax season data entry, or automating it

Both move the typing off your staff. Outsourcing moves it to other people, usually overnight and per return; automation moves it to software, in minutes. Either way the firm stays accountable for the personal information it sends, and the return is only as good as the review behind it.

Updated October 6, 2026

The same problem, two answers

Every spring a firm has more paper to type than people to type it. The two ways to take that work off staff are to send it to other people or to have software do it. They share more than they seem to: both need the firm to hand over client documents, both need a reviewer at the end, and neither changes who signs the return.

How they compare

Turnaround

An outsourcing provider works in shifts, often across time zones, so a return comes back overnight or in a few days, and later at the height of the season when every firm sends at once. Software works when the file is uploaded, and the reading and entry take minutes whether it is the first return of March or the four hundredth of April.

Capacity

A provider’s capacity is its headcount, and in April it is shared with every other client it has. Software has no queue that grows with the season.

Checking the work

An outsourced return comes back with the figures entered; checking them means finding each one in the paperwork again. Automated entry can show every figure beside the spot on the document it came from, so review is a comparison rather than a search. Either way, a firm should never file a return it has not reviewed.

Judgement

This is outsourcing’s real strength. A person can phone the client about a missing receipt or notice that something looks wrong for reasons no document states. Software flags what it is unsure of and leaves the decision with the preparer, which is the right division, but it does not ring anybody.

Personal information

Both routes give a third party a client’s SIN, income and family details. Under PIPEDA the firm stays accountable for it, needs a contract that protects it, and should tell clients when it is processed outside Canada. Ask any provider, human or software, where documents are stored, where they are read, who can see them and how long they are kept. KeyGlance’s answer: stored in Canada, read in the United States by Anthropic’s model under a zero data retention agreement, never kept by Anthropic or used for training, and visible inside KeyGlance only to the firm.

Which one fits

If most of a firm’s slow returns are slow because of volume (rentals, side businesses, medical bills, donation receipts, a year of paper), automation takes that work and gives the hours back the same day. If the slow returns are slow because the client has to be chased, the bottleneck is a conversation, and people are better at that. Most firms have far more of the first kind.

Questions we get asked about this