> Sharing all my financial info with LLM companies is not something that I like.

The price of convenience and massive time savings is taking some risks on that front. We run a small business. We heavily depend on codex doing all sorts of administrative stuff that in the past either wasn't happening at all, wasn't happening properly, too late, or was being outsourced to people with various degrees of flakiness/incompetence/ineptness. We got rid of all of those and freed up a lot of our time.

As a small business you are always reacting to incoming demands on your time (accountants, taxes, invoices, insurances, etc.) for all sorts of reasons that boil down to having to do a lot of detective work in documents, filling in lots of forms, responding to queries, etc. AI tools can do essentially all of that now faster and better than most people can. Even the complicated stuff that involves fiddling with difficult tools, poorly designed websites, convoluted processes, etc.

Half the success here is getting organized on how and where you store data. A lot of SAAS tools actually make this harder, not easier. It really matters which bank you use, for example. Some banks have decent APIs and tools and export options. Others don't. Same with accountants. Some are more forward thinking than others.

It's a bit of a leap of faith when you start delegating important stuff to LLMs. And then you realize it's mostly fine and that it's doing a better job than you would. You still should double check the output. And you probably should still use an accountant to sign off on things and do some final checks. But don't fill in forms manually or go hunting through your drive for some document or information.

Your accountant sure will.

I'm for sure reinventing the wheel here but I've had an LLM generate an app that walks me through my existing tax routine I've been running with for years. Thus no real numbers go to any LLM I just give it my situation and it fills out the form.

The plan now is to retrieve the current year's tax forms then have an LLM compare them to stored versions from last year, and look for variances (e.g. new field, new form requirements, etc) all of which an LLM would excel at (whilst basic math it historically did not).

Some inference providers have a Zero Data Retention policy

Worst case scenario what does OpenAI do with your tax return?

Oh look, yet another reason to use local inference.