Taxes, 2 min read
How to prepare your financial information for tax season
Most of the work is gathering and organizing, and almost all of it can be done before the forms arrive.
Organize during the year, not in April
Almost everything that makes tax season painful is reconstruction: working out months later what a payment was for, or which account something came from. The work is far cheaper done as it happens, and the records are far more accurate.
Countorra organizes your tax year as you go rather than producing it at the end. Uploading a document when it arrives, and keeping transactions categorized, is most of the preparation.
What to gather
The specific forms depend on your situation, but the categories are stable from year to year.
- Income documents — employment, interest, dividends, and any other income you received.
- Your filing status, and details of anyone you are claiming as a dependent.
- Records for anything you intend to deduct, if you itemize.
- Evidence of tax already paid: withholding, and any estimated payments you made.
What Countorra does, and does not do
Countorra organizes your tax information and prepares your return: a tax calculation and a summary you can export. It does not file it, does not e-file, does not submit anything to the IRS or any state, and does not provide a professional review.
The calculation has limits, and it lists them alongside every figure. It always uses the standard deduction, so itemized deductions are not modelled; it does not model federal tax credits (and only some state credits), so the real tax may be lower; and it does not yet calculate capital gains, rental, K-1 or other income — if you have any, the result is marked incomplete. It compares the tax with the withholding and payments you record to show a likely refund or balance due, but only when every figure is complete. Read that list before you rely on a number.
Documents you upload are read for their text — from the text layer of a digital PDF, or by text recognition for a photo or a scan — and any values found are shown to you as proposals. Nothing extracted from a document enters your tax information until you confirm it.
General information