Organizing your taxes doesn’t have to occur just once a year. With the right organization system, tax-related documents can be neatly and quickly organized on a weekly basis. Tax time will be less hectic as all your paperwork will already be in place! Using this tax document organizer ,you manage all your papers throughout the year. Here’s how to use it:
Create Main Categories for Tax Paperwork
Make a list of all the papers you will most likely accumulate over the year related to your taxes. Create manageable categories or buckets, as daily, weekly or monthly documents will be tossed into these categories. Here is an example:
- Income (including documents received from third parties, such as form W2s and form 1099s)
- Medical documents
- Donations
- Child care costs including daycare
- Business or professional deductions
- Tax correspondence (with IRS or state officials)
- Student loan payments
- receipts for other deductions
- Payments of tax made throughout year (such as for quarterly estimated taxes, etc.)
Set Up the Tax Document Organizer in Your Home Office
Label each of the compartments of your organizer, and as documents need to be filed, insert them into the appropriate slots, every day or every week. Come tax time, all your paperwork is already organized.
Create an Organizer Just for Receipts
If archiving receipts over the course of a tax year is your biggest organizational hurdle, then setting up a sorter just for receipts is easy. No more digging around in the file cabinet for a wrinkled business lunch expense. Select a smaller sorter for this task and organize your categories of receipts in areas such as the following:
- Medical and dental expenses that exceed 7.5 percent of your adjusted gross income
- Deductible taxes you paid elsewhere (including state, local and foreign income tax, property tax, sales tax, etc.)
- Home mortgage points
- Charitable contributions
- Casualty and theft losses
- Certain education and work-related expenses
- Miscellaneous deductions – some, like unreimbursed employee expenses, professional dues, job search expenses and tax preparation fees, must exceed a combined 2 percent of adjusted gross income to be claimed; others, like gambling losses up to the amount of winnings or casualty/theft losses from income-producing property, are not subject to that limit.
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