Organizing for Taxes

Many people — even people who are expecting a refund! — put off filing their taxes until the last minute. It’s not because they’re lazy or rebellious. It’s simply that the prospect of gathering up and organizing all the papers and receipts you need to file your taxes can feel like a mountain too steep to climb!

Take That First Step

Even if you have someone else prepare your taxes, just the task of getting all of your documents organized to hand off can take hours. And if you do your own taxes, making sure those documents are organized and complete is even more critical.

How I Can Help

As a professional organizer, I don’t help people complete their tax returns, but I DO help them take that important first step: overcoming the psychological resistance to getting started and getting organized!

As with most of my work, there are a number of ways to approach getting organized for taxes, though most commonly my services takes one of the two models described below.

Tax Documents Handoff

You simply gather up everything you can find that you will (or might!) need for your taxes — whether you’re doing them yourself of will have them prepared by someone else — and hand it off. I process your documents at my home office and return them organized and annotated with flags for any issues or missing items.

Organizing for This Year & Years Ahead

If you’d like to master organizing your tax documents yourself, we’ll work together to not only process all of this years papers but also set up a simple system you can use throughout the year, organizing tax-relevant papers as they come up.

By the time next January 1 rolls around, what feels like an insurmountable mountain this year will be nothing more than a speed bump on your way to filing your return on time and hassle-free.

Real-Life Tax Rescue

50+ bags of unorganized papers, receipts and mail that may or may not pertain to 3 years of back taxes, not so much as an enveloped opened. Try getting a CPA to touch that!
21 hours later, everything sorted into folders by tax categories, 1099s and 1098s tracked down (new ones requested for those that had been lost), my client and his CPA both breathe a huge sigh of relief.

Read more about my work in testimonials from my clients.

Tax Documents Checklists

HR Block Calculator & Checklist
Asks simple questions to determine your tax situation and create a list of what you’ll need.

TurboTax Checklist
Based on Intuit’s widely used tax software for personal income and self-employed workers.

HR Block Small Business Checklist
If you file taxes for a small business, HR Block offers this insight on how to prepare.

Note that Piles of Paper? is not affiliated in any way with HR Block or Intuit.