ERCie: A Throughput Engine for HF's Post-Moratorium Appeals Queue

What We're Proposing

You're sitting on the appeal volume now in front of you - more denied quarters than your team can grind through one interview at a time, and too much captured value to walk away from. The proposal below puts an intake-automation engine in front of your team, keeps your headcount intact, and lets you pay for completed work instead of forecast capacity.

What ERCie Is

ERCie is an intake-automation engine with a discernment layer, wired into your existing HubSpot pipeline. She runs in three modes:

1. End-to-end on revenue-decline quarters. ERCie pulls the data, validates it against the qualifying tests, generates the appeal packet, and surfaces it to your analyst at a mandatory human approval gate. On approval, the packet sends under HF's name. ERCie has no autonomous send authority - ever.
2. Intake interviews on quarters that require client conversation. ERCie conducts the qualifying interview by text and email - asks the questions, validates the answers, and surfaces the structured findings in HubSpot. By the time the case reaches your team, every answer is captured and the packet is pre-loaded.
3. Discernment - when ERCie hands off vs. completes. ERCie escalates to your team when (a) the client doesn't respond to intake within a defined window, (b) responses contain ambiguity or contradiction the model flags, (c) the case touches a pre-flagged edge category (partial-quarter eligibility, multi-entity returns, governmental-order-only quarters), or (d) your team flags the quarter for hands-on review during the weekly check-in. Everything else stays in ERCie's lane until the human approval gate.

Operating Mode

The shape of the engagement is simple: ERCie absorbs the structured, repeatable work in front of the appeals queue, and your team keeps its hands on judgment calls, edge cases, and the human approval gate. That re-shapes the analyst's day from interview-driven to review-driven, and re-shapes your queue from bandwidth-bound to throughput-bound.

We are not making a measured throughput claim in this document. The honest answer is that the lift depends on how cleanly the corpus trains, how the discernment thresholds settle in week one, and what the real edge-case mix looks like in your queue. The 30 / 60 / 90-day review (below) is the validation point - if month one shows ERCie can't cleanly handle revenue-decline end-to-end, the auto-complete mode collapses back to draft-only and we re-examine the price together.

Price

Recommended structure: $375 per completed appeal, with a $7,500/month floor

You pay $375 per completed appeal or $7,500 per month, whichever is higher. The $7,500/month minimum is equivalent to 20 completed appeals at the per-deal rate. A completed appeal is defined as ERCie producing a packet that (a) passes your analyst review at the human approval gate, and (b) ships to the IRS under HF's name. Drafts rejected at the approval gate don't count. Drafts sent back for iteration and then approved count once. Intake interviews that surface a non-qualifying client and never produce a packet don't count. The unit of payment is a packet that left the building under HF's signature.

Why the floor

• The floor kicks in only when monthly volume falls below 20 completed appeals. Below that, the engagement is operating at break-even or below for our side, and the floor preserves the team's ability to keep building, tuning, and iterating for HF on slow months.
• At your expected volume the floor never binds - per-deal billing exceeds $7,500/month well before it kicks in.
• 20 appeals/month is roughly five per week. Achievable inside any healthy month of the appeals queue.

Why $375 per appeal

It sits roughly 30x above ERCie's marginal cost (tokens + infrastructure), which leaves room for ongoing iteration and the monthly review work. It sits below your implicit per-appeal cost of an analyst handling it manually - at HF's actual loaded rates, per-analyst-appeal cost is closer to $400-450. Whole-dollar rounding for simplicity.

Headcount-equivalent defense

Practically, ERCie replaces the throughput of multiple junior ERC analysts running the same intake + drafting work in parallel. Loaded cost per analyst is ~$65-75K (base + payroll tax + benefits + tooling), so even two of them runs ~$11-12K/month in headcount alone, before recruiting drag, six-month ramp, and salary commitment carried through volume-curve uncertainty. At the floor ($7.5K/mo) or anywhere above it on per-deal volume, the engagement reads as a structural win versus the equivalent hire - and the hire stays hired whether the appeals volume holds or not.

Scope and term

• Three-month initial term, month-to-month thereafter. No long-tail commitment.
• No setup fee. Wiring, training on your corpus, and threshold tuning are inside the engagement.
• Scoped to HF-routed work - meaning appeals routed through Hundredfold's existing HubSpot pipeline. Anything outside that pipeline is out of scope under this proposal.
• 30 / 60 / 90-day review. At each checkpoint, both price and scope are re-examined against captured value. If the engagement isn't earning its keep, we adjust before it renews.
• Either party can step out at the end of any month after the three-month minimum, with reasonable written notice. We'd rather a renewable client than a hostage one.
• Out-of-scope work is a separate agreement. Services outside this engagement - other automations, non-appeals workflows, additional integrations beyond HubSpot - are scoped to a separate agreement and not covered by this engagement letter.

Risk Posture

• Mandatory human approval on every send. Auto-complete mode does not mean autonomous send. Your analyst owns every packet that leaves the building. Structurally: ERCie's HubSpot credentials are scoped read-and-draft-only; the send action requires a separate analyst-authenticated step ERCie cannot execute. The gate is enforced at the API permission layer, not at the workflow layer.
• HubSpot-native, zero data migration to leave. ERCie operates inside HF's existing pipeline. If you turn it off in month four, the pipeline keeps running.
• Wrong-letter-to-wrong-client failure mode. Per-deal-record operation inside HubSpot. ERCie cannot cross deal contexts. Every artifact cites the source deal ID; the analyst sees ground truth before approving.
• Federal-compliance liability. HF remains practitioner of record on every filing - including auto-completed revenue-decline appeals. ERCie is a drafting + intake tool with extended capability; HF owns every signature and every IRS-facing artifact. The engagement letter codifies this explicitly.
• Bad-appeal failure mode. The human approval gate is the catch. Your analyst rejects the draft, ERCie iterates, the case routes to your team if it can't be cleaned. Failure modes get caught before they go IRS-facing - and under per-deal pricing, rejected drafts cost you nothing.
• Engagement length. Three-month minimum for iteration; month-to-month after. If month four shows the volume curve isn't there, you walk.

Account Lead and Bandwidth

The relationship runs through a single account lead on our side - one point of contact for HF, no rotating cast, and no one from our team talking to your clients directly. The working pattern is bounded: a weekly check-in for the first month, then a monthly iteration cycle as things settle. If load grows past evening capacity on the account-lead side, we revisit the working pattern before you feel it.

Month One

• ERCie wired into HF's HubSpot, scoped to revenue-decline auto-complete + intake interviews on the remaining quarters.
• Discernment thresholds defined and tuned to your edge-case judgment in week one.
• Weekly check-in with your account lead; monthly iteration cycle pulling real queue items into refinement.
• Written engagement letter naming HF as practitioner of record and the ERCie team as drafting + intake tool provider, codifying the "completed appeal" definition for billing.
• 30 / 60 / 90-day review where price and scope both get re-examined against captured value.

What We Need From You

• Read-and-write API access to the appeals pipeline only - scoped to deal + contact objects on that pipeline, not company-wide. Single named service-account key held by us, audit-logged on every call, revocable by you unilaterally. Key is rotated and re-issued on any personnel change on our side, and destroyed within 24 hours of engagement end.
• One designated HF analyst as the human-in-the-loop reviewer on the approval gate.
• Your appeals corpus for ERCie to train on - templates, prior wins, denial-letter examples, edge-case judgment calls.
• A 15-minute weekly slot with your account lead for the first month.