What FinishTax Is
FinishTax is a practice-management platform for tax preparers. It helps you organize clients, collect and store documents, manage tasks and deadlines, send invoices and accept payments, communicate with clients through a secure portal, and send documents for legally binding electronic signature with identity verification. Your working data, on every plan including free, is stored in our encrypted cloud infrastructure — there is no local-only mode.
FinishTax is not a tax-calculation or e-filing service. It does not compute tax liability, prepare or generate completed tax returns, or transmit returns to the IRS or any government body. You, the tax professional, remain solely responsible for the accuracy of your work and for compliance with all applicable laws and IRS requirements, including the proper use of Form 8879 e-signature authorizations.
Your Account (Paid Plans)
To use a paid plan, you must:
- Be at least 18 years old
- Provide a valid email address
- Keep your login credentials secure and confidential
- Maintain one account per person — shared logins are not permitted
You are responsible for all activity that occurs under your account. If you suspect unauthorized access, contact us immediately at contact@finish.tax.
Acceptable Use
FinishTax is intended for tax preparation workflow management. You agree not to:
- Upload illegal, harmful, or malicious content
- Use the service to distribute malware or conduct phishing
- Attempt to reverse engineer, decompile, or extract the source code
- Circumvent any access controls or security features
- Use automated tools to scrape, crawl, or overload the service
- Resell access to the service without written permission
Your Data
You own your data entirely. We claim no rights to your client information, tasks, documents, files, or any other content you create in FinishTax.
On every plan, including free, your data is stored in our cloud infrastructure and is accessible only through your authenticated account. Social Security Numbers, IRS preparer credentials, and connected-account tokens are encrypted by FinishTax with AES-256-GCM before they reach the database. We do not sell your data or use it for advertising. We share it only with the service providers needed to run FinishTax, as described in our Privacy Policy.
You can export all of your data at any time using Settings → Export Data.
Electronic Signatures & Identity Verification
FinishTax includes electronic signature features, including for IRS Form 8879. By using these features, you and your clients consent to do business electronically and to the use of electronic records and signatures, which have the same legal effect as handwritten signatures under the federal ESIGN Act and applicable state UETA laws.
- You may request a paper copy of any signed record, and may withdraw consent to electronic records, by contacting contact@finish.tax (withdrawing consent may prevent use of the e-signature features).
- To sign electronically you need a current web browser, an internet connection, and the ability to receive email.
- Signer identity may be verified through our provider Persona using a government-issued photo ID and a selfie (NIST IAL2) before signing.
- As the preparer, you are responsible for confirming that electronic signing is appropriate for a given document and for retaining signed records as required.
Payments and Refunds
- Paid plans are billed monthly or annually through Stripe
- All paid plans include a 7-day free trial. A payment method is required to start the trial, but nothing is charged during it. The first charge is made on day 8, at the plan price you selected, unless you cancel before then. Cancelling during the trial costs nothing
- You may cancel your subscription at any time from Settings → Billing
- Cancellation takes effect at the end of your current billing period — no partial-period refunds
- If we increase prices, existing subscribers will receive at least 30 days written notice before the new price takes effect. Founding-firm subscriptions are excluded: their price is fixed for the life of the subscription
- Annual subscriptions that are cancelled receive access through the end of the paid year
Availability and Reliability
- Free plan: Provided as-is with no uptime guarantee
- Paid plans: We target 99.5% uptime for cloud-synced features. Scheduled maintenance windows will be communicated in advance when possible
We keep encrypted nightly backups of the service for disaster recovery. The Export Data feature exists to give you a portable copy of your own records, and we recommend keeping one.
Limitation of Liability
FinishTax is a workflow management tool. We are not liable for:
- Missed tax deadlines or filing errors
- Professional errors or omissions in your tax preparation work
- Any consequences arising from decisions made based on information organized in FinishTax
To the maximum extent permitted by law, our total liability is limited to the amount you paid for the service in the 3 months preceding the event giving rise to the claim.
Termination
- We may suspend or terminate accounts that violate these terms, with notice when reasonably possible
- Canceling a paid subscription does not delete your data — it downgrades your account to the free plan, and your data is retained until you delete it
- You may delete your account and data at any time from Settings → Account → Delete Account, or by emailing privacy@finish.tax to request deletion
Governing Law
These terms are governed by the laws of the United States. Any disputes arising from these terms or your use of FinishTax will be resolved by binding arbitration in accordance with the rules of the American Arbitration Association.
Contact
Questions about these terms? Email us at legal@finish.tax.