SAM

~$300M-500M representing ~15k-20k mid-market US CPA firms that process high volumes of complex returns but lack internal engineering resources

SOM

~$15M-30M realistic 3-year capture assuming successful penetration of regional firm partnerships

TAM

~100k North American tax preparation practices × ~$15k-20k/yr allocated to document intake software and seasonal admin labor ≈ $1.5B-2.0B

Growth Rate

~12-18%/yr, driven by an acute shortage of junior accounting talent and rising seasonal labor costs

Paid Comparable Spend

~$15-25/hr for seasonal data-entry temps, offshore BPO seats, or ~$5-15 per return for legacy template-based OCR tools like SurePrep

Kill Thresholds

• Straight-through processing rate remains below 85% after 45 days
• More than 20% of extracted documents require manual preparer overrides
• Customer Acquisition Cost exceeds $5,000 per mid-market firm
• Pilot-to-paid conversion rate drops below 30% after the first tax deadline
• Compute and API costs reduce gross margin per return below 65%

Leading Metrics

• Straight-through processing (STP) percentage per return
• Average time spent manually correcting extracted fields per document
• Time-to-first-value from account creation to first successfully exported return
• Number of seasonal labor hours displaced per firm per week

What Proves Right

Mid-market CPA firms replace seasonal admin temps and legacy OCR tools with the ingestion system. The product achieves a 95% straight-through processing rate on complex forms like K-1s and brokerage statements without human review. Firms gladly pay $10 per processed return because it directly eliminates $25/hr temporary labor costs.

What Proves Wrong

Tax preparers spend more time auditing and correcting AI extraction errors than they would manually typing the data. The system fails to reliably map non-standard, multi-page brokerage statements, causing immediate loss of trust. Firms refuse to adopt the tool during tax season due to workflow disruption, pushing sales cycles beyond 120 days.