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Accountant reviewing clean financial dashboards with busy season under control
Answering client calls right now

AI Front Desk for Accountants

Tax season triples your calls. Not your team.

Frontly answers every one, in parallel, so no client waits.

Get StartedTry a Free Test Call
Live in about an hourAnswers 24/7Unlimited concurrent callsKeeps your existing number

HEAR IT FOR YOURSELF

Hear it book a client now

Call our AI agent right now. It will handle a tax-season client inquiry, just like it would for your firm. No signup required.

It runs in your browser. Nothing to install, no number to give us.No signup, no card, no waiting on a sales rep.Interrupt it, change your mind, ask for a human. It is the live agent, not a recording.
Sample call
A call like the one you are about to make
  1. Frontly

    Good morning, thanks for calling the practice. How can I help?

  2. Caller

    I need someone to handle my return this year. I have a rental property now.

  3. Frontly

    I can book you with an adviser. Are you an existing client, or is this your first time with us?

  4. Caller

    First time. My name is Alina.

  5. Frontly

    Thanks Alina. An individual return with a rental property is a forty five minute first appointment. I have Tuesday at 10 in the morning.

  6. Caller

    Tuesday works. Do I need to bring anything?

  7. Frontly

    Your income statements and the rental income and expense records. I have emailed you the same list so nothing gets missed.

Captured in your dashboard
Name
Alina
Type
New client, individual return
Time
Tuesday, 10:00 AM
Escalated
No

Your script, your appointment types and your escalation rules are set during setup.

The short answer

What is Frontly for accounting firms?

Frontly is an AI virtual receptionist and answering service for accounting and bookkeeping firms. It answers every client call 24 hours a day through tax season, books appointments, and captures the caller's question in your Frontly dashboard, so the partner who takes the meeting walks in already briefed. Live in about an hour.

THE PROBLEM

Tax Season Triples Your Call Volume. Your Front Desk Doesn't Triple.

3x

call volume spike between January and the April filing deadline compared to off-peak months

4-6 weeks

typical hire-to-productive time for a new admin. Filing season is barely three months.

$1,200-$5,000+

average annual fee per small-business client. Losing a handful of intake calls a year is real revenue

$52K+/yr

loaded cost of a full-time front-desk admin. Frontly covers the peak 3x surge 24/7 for a fraction of it.

HOW IT WORKS

Live in About an Hour. Ready for Your Next Quarter.

1

Connect Your Phone

Forward your firm's line or get a dedicated AI number. No hardware, no IT project. Takes 5 minutes.

2

We Design Your Workflow

Our team maps your service types (individual returns, business returns, payroll, bookkeeping, advisory), fee structures, and partner availability. We script Frontly to triage existing clients, qualify new leads, and book the right meeting type.

3

Go Live

Frontly answers every call 24/7, books meetings into your Frontly dashboard, logs client questions, and escalates urgent IRS notices or filing-deadline queries to the right partner.

WHAT FRONTLY HANDLES

Every Client Call, Handled

Frontly answers the tax-season surge in parallel and books the meetings your front desk cannot get to. Every inquiry lands in your Frontly dashboard, with nothing to integrate. The AI captures questions only and never gives tax advice.

New-client inquiries

Captures the service needed (individual return, business return, payroll, bookkeeping, advisory), qualifies the lead, and books the right meeting type.

Existing-client calls

Handles document questions, appointment changes, and status checks so your team is not pulled off client work.

Filing-season overflow

Answers unlimited calls in parallel from January through the April deadline, so no client hits voicemail during the surge.

Extension and estimated-tax questions

Fields questions about extensions, quarterly estimated payments, and outstanding paperwork, then routes anything that needs a preparer.

After-hours and general questions

Answers fee, deadline, and filing questions 24/7, and escalates an urgent IRS notice to the right partner.

Visual Workflow Builder

Script Your Client Calls Around Your Service Mix

1

We Build It For You

Our team maps your service types, individual returns, business returns, payroll, bookkeeping and advisory, then scripts which meeting each caller gets booked into.

2

New Client Versus Existing

The script separates a prospective client who needs qualifying from an existing client chasing a document, and handles each differently.

3

Inquiries Only, Never Tax Advice

The AI captures the question and books the meeting. It does not answer tax questions, and you set that boundary.

4

Built For The Surge

Set different rules for peak season, so January to April behaves differently from a quiet June.

5

Change It Yourself

Adjust partner availability, meeting types, or deadline rules between quarters without waiting on us.

Outbound calling, and deploying Frontly into your own cloud, are enterprise capabilities scoped with our team. See enterprise

See all features

INTEGRATIONS

Works with the software accounting already runs on

Frontly connects to any system that exposes an OAuth2 or API-key integration. These are the ones we have verified for this industry.

QuickBooks Online

Connects via OAuth2

Visit QuickBooks Online

Xero

Connects via OAuth2

Visit Xero

Karbon

Connects via API key

Visit Karbon

Not on the list? If your system offers an OAuth2 or API-key integration, we can connect it. Tell us what you run and we will confirm before you commit to anything.

WHAT USUALLY DECIDES IT

The three questions that come up every time

A real person, whenever the caller wants one

Every workflow can hand the call to the right adviser or partner. The transfer carries a spoken briefing, so your team picks up already knowing who is calling and why. The caller never has to explain themselves twice, which is usually the moment a good call turns into a complaint.

More than one language, on the same number

Frontly handles client calls in more than one language on the same practice number. Plenty of accounting practices are built on a community client base, and that relationship usually starts on the phone.

Flat monthly rate, with the meter switched off

No per-minute billing, no per-call fee, and no cap on how many questions the AI is allowed to answer. Your busiest month does not produce your largest invoice, and adding another topic to its knowledge does not add a line to the bill. See pricing for the current rates.

ANSWERING SERVICE OR AI

Answering service or AI receptionist for an accounting practice?

An answering service takes a message during tax season and hands you a stack of callbacks. An AI receptionist answers the question, books the meeting, or captures what the client needs. For a practice the point is that your most expensive people stop being the ones answering routine calls.

Where a staffed answering service still wins

An anxious client with a genuine problem. An audit letter, a debt notice, a business in trouble. Those calls want a person, and a good bureau operator will recognize one and put it through rather than take a message.

Where Frontly wins

The rest of the surge is where is my return, when is the deadline, can I book a time, and what do you need from me. That is thousands of minutes of partner and manager time every quarter, and none of it needs a licensed accountant to answer it.

Most businesses end up running one or the other rather than both. If you are weighing it up properly, the full cost and capability breakdown is in Frontly against a virtual receptionist.

THE ECONOMICS

Your most expensive people are answering "where is my return?"

An accounting practice does not have a call-volume problem. It has a resource-allocation problem. Accountants are the most expensive people in the building, and a large share of the calls that interrupt them require no accounting judgment at all.

Status callsare the interruption, and almost none of them need an accountantWhere is my return up to, did you receive my documents, what do I owe, when is it due. Every one of these is answerable from your own information without pulling a qualified accountant off billable work.
Tax seasonis when the phone peaks and your team is least interruptibleThe peak is a capacity problem, not a headcount problem. You cannot hire and train an admin fast enough for a three-month surge, and you should not need to.
Billable hoursare the only number that matters hereNot calls answered. Every interruption absorbed by the front desk is time an accountant spends on the work clients actually pay for, at a fraction of the cost of the person being interrupted.
Stored and hosted in your region: US, EU, UK
Encrypted in transit and at rest
Enterprise: deploy in your own cloud or on-prem

FAQ

Frequently Asked Questions

KEEP EXPLORING

Keep exploring Frontly for Accounting

Go deeper on the capabilities, comparisons, and guides that matter most.

24/7 inbound answering

How Frontly answers every call, qualifies the caller, and books the job in your dashboard.

How inbound works

Your call flow, your rules

What the agent asks, what it books on the spot, and what gets a human woken up. Built with you before you go live.

See the workflow builder

After-hours answering

Clients ring outside office hours during the deadline crunch. See how after-hours calls are captured.

See after-hours

AI receptionist vs a hire

The ROI comparison against a part-time front desk, with the math shown.

Read the guide

Ready to Survive Every Tax Season?

Set up your AI front desk in about an hour and cover every client call, day or night.

Activate My Accounting Front DeskTalk to the Team
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