Compliance, setup, compatibility, pricing and trust — including the ones most vendors would rather leave off a website. Where an answer is "not yet," it says not yet.
IRC §7216 governs when a preparer may disclose or use a client's tax return information, and disclosure to a third party generally requires written consent obtained in advance and in a prescribed form. Whether a given tool triggers that requirement depends on whether your client's information actually reaches a third party.
Sophicor's software is deployed inside your firm's own Google Workspace and runs under your account. Sophicor's systems do not receive your client data, so using Sophicor does not itself place that information in a third party's hands. Other arrangements your firm has — outsourced preparation, hosted tax software, anything sent outside the firm — are assessed on their own facts. This describes what the rule requires and what our architecture does; it is not legal advice, and your own counsel governs. Current as of August 2026.
Tax preparers are treated as financial institutions under the FTC Safeguards Rule and must maintain a written information security program. In practice that means a designated qualified individual, a documented risk assessment, access controls, encryption of customer information, multi-factor authentication, an incident response plan, and ongoing oversight of the service providers who touch that data.
That last item is the one that grows heavier with every vendor a firm adds. Sophicor is built to reduce it rather than add to it: because the software runs inside your own Google Workspace and our systems never receive client data, there is one fewer external environment for your program to assess. This is a description of the rule and of our architecture, not legal advice. Current as of August 2026.
In your firm's own Google Workspace, where it already lives. Sophicor does not operate a cloud, a server, or a data centre that holds your client documents. The application is built on Google Apps Script and deployed into your tenancy, so processing happens where the documents already are.
If a partner or an IT reviewer asks where your clients' data sits, the answer is the same after adopting Sophicor as it was before: in your own Google Workspace, under your own agreement with Google.
Sophicor cannot. There is no Sophicor environment for the documents to travel to — the software runs inside your Workspace, and the text is read by Google's own optical character recognition under your firm's account. No third-party AI vendor is involved in reading your documents.
The only thing that reaches Sophicor is a count of how many clients your firm has, read through your Workspace and your Stripe subscription, for billing. Not names, not documents, not returns — the number.
No. Each firm's Sophicor installation runs inside that firm's own Google Workspace tenancy. There is no shared processing environment, no multi-tenant database of tax documents, and no pooled storage — because Sophicor does not operate an environment your documents pass through at all.
This is the structural difference between Sophicor and shared-cloud tax automation, and it is the reason the answer above can be a flat no rather than a description of safeguards.
Nothing happens to it. Every client record and every document is already in your Google Workspace and was never anywhere else, so cancelling Sophicor removes the automation and leaves the archive exactly where it sits.
There is no export to request, no data-retrieval clause to invoke, and no retention window to worry about. That is not a policy we chose to offer — it is a consequence of where the software runs.
No. There are no servers to provision, no software to install on your machines, and nothing to maintain afterwards. If your firm already uses Google Workspace, you already have the infrastructure Sophicor runs on.
Setup is done together in one guided session. You need a Workspace administrator present to approve the installation, and that is the extent of the technical involvement.
About an hour, in one guided session with us. We do not claim a ten-minute self-serve signup, because configuring a firm's document intake and review workflow properly takes a conversation.
What you need ready beforehand is short: a Google Workspace administrator who can approve the install, and your tax software available for the Forge configuration step.
Your Google Workspace, which you were already managing. Sophicor adds no servers, no separate infrastructure, and no additional environment for your firm to secure or patch.
Day to day, your team uses Sophicor the way they use the rest of Workspace — documents come in, extraction proposes values, a licensed professional reviews and verifies each one, and verified data moves into your tax software.
Then you are the firm Sophicor was designed for. The application installs into the Workspace you already have, under the agreement you already signed, and your existing security posture carries over unchanged.
If your firm does not use Google Workspace yet, that is a prerequisite rather than an obstacle — it is a standard business subscription, and we will walk you through it during setup.
Sophicor Forge populates Drake Tax today. Support for additional packages is on the roadmap and is not available yet — we will not show you a logo for software we do not support.
Sophicor Pro — client management, document intake, triage and review — works alongside any tax software, because it sits ahead of the filing step rather than inside it.
Sophicor extracts field values from W-2s and common 1099-series forms, with the supported set expanding as extraction is refined. Sophicor Pro is in active beta and the list grows regularly.
Documents outside the extracted set are not a dead end: they upload, route and sit in the client's file for review like any other document. They simply are not populated automatically yet.
Not yet. K-1 extraction is on the roadmap and is not built today, and we would rather tell you that here than have you discover it in February.
K-1s can still be uploaded, stored and routed through your Sophicor workflow — the automated field extraction is what is not available for them.
Yes. Sophicor Pro can run alongside an existing practice management system, and firms often adopt it that way — starting with document intake and review before moving anything else.
Sophicor Forge is narrower by design: it performs the last mile into your tax software and does not require you to change anything upstream of it.
Sophicor Pro+Forge, the combined product most firms buy, is $375 a month for Starter, $750 for Professional and $1,250 for Business — each billed annually. Pro and Forge are also available separately.
Tiers are defined by the number of clients included rather than by the volume of work you put through them. Full detail, including multi-year terms, is on the pricing page.
Sophicor Pro+Forge does not charge per return or per document. Your price is set by your tier, and filing more returns for the clients you have does not increase it.
This is the structural difference from per-return automation tools, where the invoice grows every time you do more work. A tier stops growing; a meter does not.
You move to the next tier. Sophicor does not meter you or bill an overage per client — the tiers exist so your cost is predictable at the start of a season rather than discovered at the end of one.
If your firm is close to a boundary, tell us during setup and we will help you pick the tier that fits the year ahead.
Yes — a full refund, no questions asked, within 30 days of payment. On multi-year prepayment, year one is refundable; later years are cancelled rather than refunded.
We publish the carve-out alongside the promise because a guarantee with a surprise in it is not a guarantee.
There is no time-limited free trial. There is an interactive demo you can walk through without a sales call, and the 30-day full refund, which does the same job with less pressure — you use the real product with your real workflow rather than a sandbox.
The demo is at demo.sophicor.com.
The honest answer is that you should not have to. Sophicor is deliberately built so that trusting us is not the thing standing between your clients' documents and a stranger — the software runs inside your own Google Workspace, and our systems do not receive your client data.
Sophicor holds no compliance certification today: no SOC 2, no ISO 27001. We say that plainly rather than implying otherwise. What we offer instead is an architecture you can have your own IT reviewer examine, and a boundary we describe precisely on the security page.
Yatin Miglani, an Enrolled Agent in Phoenix, Arizona, who spent years inside CPA firms preparing returns and watching the same problem repeat: every automation tool sent client data to a shared vendor cloud, charged per return, and asked the preparer to trust an architecture they could not audit.
Sophicor was built solo, nights and weekends, around a full-time job. That is a fair thing to weigh when you evaluate us — as is the fact that the person who designed the review step has signed returns himself.
You keep everything. Every client record and every document is already in your Google Workspace — they were never anywhere else — so if Sophicor ceased to exist tomorrow you would lose the automation and keep the entire archive, in place, in a system you already own.
Most vendors would rather you did not ask this. We put it on the site because it is the clearest single proof of what the architecture actually does.