The strongest single item on your page. People hire an accountant, not a practice — and a stock photograph is recognised instantly, which costs more trust than it buys.

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Used whenever your firm sends an invoice or generates a printable PAID IN FULL official receipt across both Ledgerly Tax and Books.

Used only by Export, to offer the one format you need instead of six. Leaving it unset costs nothing — the export still works and simply shows all of them.

Leaving it off never overrides a client who has already said no — their choice is still honoured, and it stays visible to them so they can change it. Whether you need their consent at all is your call under IRC §7216: disclosure to a US-based service provider that makes no substantive determination about the return is generally permitted without it, but that judgement is yours, not ours. You still warrant in these terms that you have obtained whatever consent the law requires of you.

What is sent. When a document is uploaded — a prior return, a W-2, a brokerage statement — its text is read and sent to Anthropic's Claude API so the figures can be pulled out. The client's name, their address, email and phone, the names of their spouse and dependants, every SSN and EIN, and account and loan numbers are removed on this server first. What leaves is figures and payer names: wages of 184,500 from Northgate Supply Co, with nothing saying whose return it is.

Photographed and scanned documents. A page with no text layer is read by OCR here on the server, then redacted, then sent. OCR output is put through a second, stricter pass because a garbled identifier matches no pattern and would otherwise survive the first one. If the masked version still shows an identifier, the document is not sent at all.

Anthropic's handling. Their commercial API does not train on this data and deletes it within a bounded window.

The figures themselves are not removed — reading them is the point. Nor are the names of the institutions that issued the documents, since an employer or a broker is not your client's personal information and is what tells two W-2s apart. Schedule E property addresses stay for the same reason, and because they are public record.

Your judgement, not ours. IRC §7216 governs disclosure of information furnished in connection with preparing a return, and it has no de-identification exemption of the kind HIPAA provides. Whether redacted figures fall outside it is a call for your firm to make. Redaction is thorough but not infallible. This is on by default because it is what makes the product useful; turn it off if your firm takes a different view, and document collection will work exactly as before — only the automatic reading of figures stops.

Client fee & payment rails: Your firm's default payment method (CPAcharge, QuickFee, Direct ACH, Zelle, Check, Wire), hosted payment link, and invoice branding are configured in Client invoicing & payment rails ↑.