StanfordTax

StanfordTax is a US tax intake and workpaper preparation platform that pulls prior-year client data directly out of seven major US tax engines and uses last year's actual numbers to personalize this year's questionnaire and document checklist. The angle is integration depth, not breadth.

Where Soraban competes on end-to-end and Truss competes on prep-routing, StanfordTax competes on the intake-binder lane and the price floor. Pull-down integrations cover Lacerte, UltraTax CS, Drake, ProConnect, ProSeries, CCH Axcess, and CCH ProSystem fx. Returns supported are 1040, 1120, 1120S, and 1065. The output is a prep-ready PDF binder with auto-rename, auto-bookmark, auto-sort in tax-return order, plus tick-mark and reference annotations for the preparer.

There is a real free tier at $0, which is rare in this segment. The Free plan covers the client questionnaire, the preparer workpaper, and all four return types with self-serve support. Premium is $18 per return, with credits that never expire and no minimums, plus email and live chat with 24-hour response times. Enterprise, from $25 per return, adds 1-hour response and a 5,000-client minimum. That per-return pricing with no seat fees makes it the cheapest of the three intake tools at typical volumes.

The Karbon integration is unusually deep. Karbon launched smart tax organizers powered by StanfordTax in December 2025, with two-way status sync, up to 5 free organizers for Karbon customers, and additional discounts. If your firm runs Karbon as the practice-management spine, this is the natural intake layer.

StanfordTax is US-only. The platform supports only US federal return types and connects only to US tax engines. Today it stops at the binder: it does not push data back into the tax engine the way Soraban does, it does not deliver the finished return to the client, and it does not offer the prep-routing that Truss layers on top. Founded 2021, headquartered in New York City, bootstrapped per Crunchbase and Tracxn.

Documented at scale up to 3,000 returns per year per a Karbon customer case study, so the upper end of mid-size firms is supported. Founder Dan Berenholtz's path runs IRS Washington DC, Cornell undergrad, Stanford grad school. The naming is the founder's nod to that path, not a Stanford University affiliation.