An Ode to You, Our Customers and the Evolution of TrueRoll

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Ever since Joe Walsh and I started TrueRoll around my kitchen table (and invited Matt Amann to join us), our purpose has been simple: make the work of tax assessment offices easier. 

With data. With algorithms. With software. Now, with AI.

The strategy came from our very first customers: Stacey Poteete (Walker CAD), Jennifer Gomric Minton (St. Clair), Joe Don Bobbitt (then-McLennan), Eddie Creamer CFA (St. Johns), Don S. (Denton), Nicole Jardine, PhD, Scott Smith (Cook), Al Dams, John Arthur Wilson (King), Mark Miller (Monroe), Sheron James Matt Caldwell (Lee FL), Patrick Alesandrini, CAE, RES, FIAAO, MAI, SRA, CFE (Hillsborough).

We learned very early that administering homesteads is a head scratcher.

Determining residency is so difficult that some counties outsourced accuracy checks to accounting and law firms for one-time audits. But the moment those audits ended, they were out of date. That created more work for assessment offices and more frustration for citizens. 

It didn’t make sense to us, or to you.

People’s lives are dynamic. So is their eligibility status. And most people aren’t aiming to fib on their homesteads.

So, together, we built Proactive Homestead Monitoring, the first and still only solution of its kind (turns out it’s super complicated to bring together 1000s of dirty datasets and match them in a flexible and intelligible way). It makes it easy to proactively notify citizens of changing eligibility status, while also identifying citizens who are eligible but not yet receiving the homestead benefit.

That’s when you asked us, “Could you apply those same datasets and algorithms to the thousands of homestead applications we receive each year?”

So we partnered with you to automate the intake of online and paper forms, apply business rules, and connect to CAMA. Special thanks to Alvin Lankford CAE, AAS, RPA, CCA and Jessica Miller RPA AAS (WCAD), and Jeff Taylor (Livingston), among others.

We called that workflow Application Vetter, we connected it to state driver’s license systems, and customer's staff got time back.

The scale changed when we partnered with Beata Kasper and her I&A team at Harris Central Appraisal District, Shane at Dallas Central Appraisal District, and Joe Don Bobbitt again-this time with Tarrant County. You asked us to process tens of thousands of paper applications this time. 

We knew we had to be scary-good at reading poorly handwritten applications, matching names with photos of driver’s licenses, and checking congruency with government databases. 

What we didn’t expect were handwritten notes and photos of licenses taken with what looks like a 1970s Polaroid camera, with grease on the lens???

But it’s a new era in software, and AI-powered OCR can handle it without complaint, if you prompt it nicely.

This isn’t Adobe-scan-a-form-OCR from 2015.

It’s interpretation. Verification. Inference. Exception handling.

Work that someone previously had to do manually before anything could be painfully keyed-and-clicked into aging CAMA UIs 💾.

By then, the pattern became obvious.

We could now score eligibility across the entire tax roll against thousands of datasets, read anything off any document, configure business rules that match the office’s specific processes using prompt engineering, and integrate all of it into CAMAs built 20 to 40 years ago.

You then told us:

“This isn’t just homesteads. That workflow (intake, process, commit) is how all the work in our office gets done.”

Property transfers. Forms. Affidavits of heirship. Anything that begins as a document and turns into work.

So we started with the most time-consuming, highest-volume, most important document workflow: Property Transfers.

Once again, we partnered with our customers, including Tarrant, McHenry County, and Bastrop CAD, and applied everything we’d learned up to this point. 

Our property transfer automation workflow can now automatically categorize transfer documents, extract important data, flag exceptions requiring manual handling, fix malformed addresses, identify possible fraud, and confirm what gets committed to CAMA, all without manual work.

Then you told us there was a lot more than “just deeds.”

There’s paper coming in from all directions.

50,000 protest documents in Tarrant. Sewer permits signaling new assessed value in Bastrop. Sales declarations attached to transfers in McHenry. Business personal property forms in every state that runs that process.

Everything from marriages and dissolutions to address change forms needs to be categorized, extracted, rules applied, and committed to the system of record.

We realized that helping with all document-initiated workflows is how we can make your work easier.

Homestead wasn’t a special case. It was a forcing function.

It forced us to solve the hardest version of the problem first: unstructured inputs, real-world messiness, judgment calls, office-specific rules, and absolute precision at the point it hits CAMA.

Once we understood that, the direction became obvious. We weren’t building a better homestead tool. We were changing how office staff work — shifting from manual processing to expert review and judgment of work that AI has already processed.

What’s changed?

AI can finally do real work.

But it needs subject-matter experts like you, and focused technology partners like TrueRoll, to help it understand what it’s doing in order to be helpful.

We needed a better name for what we’ve built.  So we came up with one:

TrueRoll is a system of action.

A system of action is where the work gets done.

A system of action elevates staff from working the process to serving the people.

A system of action handles categorization, interpretation, routing, extraction, and exception handling based on your office’s rules.

It works in tandem with your system of record, CAMA.

So your team can focus on review, judgment, and service.

This evolution is yours. You shaped it by inviting us into your 150+ offices and sharing the challenges that mattered to you, and how we could make your work easier.

If you’ve been part of this journey, thank you.

If you’re curious where it’s going next, we’ve updated our website to tell the story more clearly. www.trueroll.io