The real problem
“When will my assessment arrive?” “Which documents do I need?” “Are you handling my trade tax?” These questions cost your team hours every day – hours missing from real advisory work.
“When will my tax assessment arrive?” is answered several times a day in every tax firm – by trained tax clerks who were never hired for that.
By afternoon, callback notes pile up. By the time they are all done, the day is over – or the next morning already starts with yesterday’s backlog.
January, March, May: everyone calls at once – exactly when the team is already at capacity. Every distracted quarter-hour is missing from a real client matter.
How it works
Not a generic announcement system. The livestep AI assistant is trained on your tax advisory firm and knows your services, responsibilities and processes.
The assistant learns from what already exists in your firm: website, PDFs, SharePoint or Confluence. No new system, no manual data upkeep. When something changes, you update it in one place – the assistant pulls it in automatically.
The assistant picks up, introduces itself as your office and asks about the request. Natural language. No keypad menu.
Opening hours, appointment booking, document lists, general responsibilities. The assistant answers immediately, with no hold queue, around the clock.
For personal information (processing status, outstanding documents, document status) the assistant verifies the caller with two-factor authentication: known phone number + one-time password by email. After confirmation it queries live data from your DATEV system. GDPR-compliant, no data stored on the AI side.
As soon as a request needs your expertise, the assistant forwards it or creates a summary for your team. You know what it’s about before you call back.
Platform
The phone assistant hears what clients ask internally. Brand Intelligence shows what is said about you outside your firm – in reviews, trade media and public sources.
Both levels in one dashboard. Phone reporting shows which topics concern your clients. Brand Intelligence shows whether the same topics shape your external perception. What is asked often internally is often visible externally too.
Google reviews, industry portals, social mentions – summarised and scored. You see at a glance how your tax advisory firm is perceived, without searching every day yourself.
Is your name mentioned in trade media, local papers or online sources? livestep captures mentions automatically and presents them in a structured way.
Which tax topics are moving the market right now? Which questions are clients asking industry-wide? The analysis shows trends before they arrive as enquiries at your firm.
Which questions come up most often? At which times? Reporting from the AI agent makes patterns visible and helps improve processes deliberately.
DATEV integration
Via a DATEV MCP server, the phone assistant connects directly to your DATEV system. Clients authenticate with two-factor authentication and receive real answers – no hold queue, no callback.
How authentication works: Incoming call → phone number is matched to the stored client → one-time password by email → data access after confirmation. No password to forget. No security risk from generic PIN systems.
The DATEV connection requires your own DATEV MCP server, which you obtain separately – via klardaten.com (from 85 €/month). livestep then connects to that server. No lock-in, no embedding in our infrastructure. Your data stays in your hands.
Security & data protection
AI telephony in a tax advisory firm stands or falls with trust in the infrastructure. Here is what livestep is built on.
All data remains in the EU. Data centre AWS eu-central-1 (Frankfurt) – certified to ISO 27001, ISO 27017, ISO 27018, SOC 1/2/3 and BSI C5.
Access to client data only after verification by phone number and one-time password by email. No password that can be lost.
The assistant processes tax data only at the moment of the request. Nothing is stored, nothing is trained. Data flows, but does not stay.
Legal basis Art. 6(1)(b) GDPR (performance of a contract). AWS provides a GDPR-compliant data processing agreement. No transfer to third countries.
The Federal Chamber of Tax Advisers (BStBK) recommends two-factor authentication for access to client portals. livestep follows this recommendation consistently.