Evernote Makeover Series: How to Do Your Taxes With Evernote

Tips and Stories | 15 Mar 201115 Mar 11 | By Kasey Fleisher Hickey

46 comments

We’re pretty sure that no one actually looks forward to doing their taxes. In fact, most of us tend to feel a sort of panic when we realize that we have to go through a year’s worth of paperwork associated with all of our finances and whittle them down into a few spreadsheets. Let’s take a look at how you’re used to doing taxes, and how to do them the Evernote way.

The Old Way
For those of us who are organized, doing taxes means keeping a file folder with all of our financial statements, documents, pay stubs and investments somewhere in our house. Then, come tax season, pouring these documents out on our kitchen table (or our accountant’s desk) and manually plugging in numbers into our tax forms.

This process is tedious for those who are organized, but take folks who keep these sorts of documents scattered in all sorts of places – some on paper, some online, some in the closet, some at the office – and a long night(s) is guaranteed.

The Evernote Way

Invest in an affordable scanner for your home (a Fujitsu ScanSnap or one of our other scanner partners). Connect it to your Evernote account. Then, every time you get a pay stub, bank statement, or information about your investments/mortgage documents, simply scan it to your Evernote account. You can also clip your online statements to your Evernote account. You can drop all of these documents into a notebook labeled ‘Finances’ or even ’2011 Taxes.’ If you want to be even more specific, you can tag each statement with its type (for example: Bank of America, Pay Stub).

When you’re on the go, make a habit of taking photos of receipts (for example: when you’re on a business trip) and tagging these images with a tag like ‘receipts’ to make sure that they’re organized. Check out Trunk partners like Jotnot and Docscanner, which can improve the quality of your photos and make them even more searchable in Evernote.

Come tax time, you can easily find any and all documents that you need in your Evernote account. Once you’ve completed your taxes, save your paperwork in the same folder by scanning it, or simply dropping the PDF into your notebook. You’ll have your previous year’s tax documents in one place for easy reference the following tax season.

Are you doing your taxes with Evernote? Please share your tips and suggestions in the comments.

This post is part of our Makeover Series. Have you used Evernote to makeover an aspect of your life? Please share your story in the comments.

Learn more about Makeover Series

Lasvegaswil

I have saved every receipt and paystub and charitable donation stub for the past two years in Evernote. I have a manual 43 folded system for my paper, and every Friday I take 2 minutes ( timed it. Average nuts to bolts for all of my paper) and roll everything through my Fuji. Simple, no stress, and almost no time comparatively. .

I DARE the IRS for an audit. I actually have thought about how it’s going to be. All I’m going to do is share my Finance notebook with the auditor, tell them to call me with any issues, and sleep with a disgustingly smug smile on my face. Oh, the joy. The unadulterated joy of being super organized with Evernote. Bring. It. On.
http://www.ineedmoneyloan.com joowoo

The experience of the process of re-install is terrible. Data base can’t be imported into evernote,and I lost my almost one year data. FK!
Although I have located the path of my data base, the Evernote can’t find that. Evernote is dangeous for me!
dwt

Useful a program as Evernote is, I must wonder just how secure all your tax data are out there “on the cloud”.
Robert Loewen

OK, But what happens if you’re audited, do jpg camera-phone images count as the real thing, or pdf?

I know in Canada the only photo type admissible as a legal document is a raw file because it’s uneditable.

Does anyone know the Canada Revenue Agency’s take on this?
savagemike

This is a good idea – BUT !
It points up a problem with evernote not allowing encrypting automatically of entire notes.

This should be available either by folder or by tags.

Set a password in the options for a particular folder (or tag – I’d like to see more stuff tied to tags and not folders all around as it is MUCH more flexible).
Then anything loaded into that folder (or assigned that tag) has the entire note encrypted by default.
Then have the ability to key the password to light up any viewed note so you don’t have to type it in to look at each particular note – but can scan back through the notebook (or tag) by entering the password just one time.
- savagemike
  
  To ease viewing back of encrypted notes as above… perhaps be able to search for a password with special signifier characters so it lists out all notes password protected with that password – and allows viewing them.
  
  Example – if I use ‘mypass’ as the password for my tax folder (or anything else), then searching for the term ‘PW*mypass’ gives a list of all notes encrypted with that password and also allows viewing of all of them until that search term is cleared.
Jim Sewell

One extra step I take is that when I scan a receipt, say from the pharmacy, I name that note:

2011_03_16 – Medicines – $34.97

That way when I get ready for the taxes I can just pull up the notes tagged “medicine” in a list view and then just run down the list adding them all together. It’s better than going into each one to find the amount and I’m not disciplined enough to keep a running total.

If Evernote ever closes shop there are a lot of us who will feel like we just went back to the stone ages!
- thomas
  
  Thank you Jim for that awesome tip!
http://s1500-scanner.com/ James Titus

I started this two years ago (2009) and am very glad I did. It’s made it much easier to do my taxes.

The key for me was having a very easy to use scanner. I like the Fujitsu S1500. I liked it so much I created a website that shows how the integration works between Evernote and the Fujitsu!
http://s1500-scanner.com/evernote-and-scansnap-an-awesome-duo/

I try to tag all my tax info with “Tax 2010″ or whatever year. Makes it much easier to find later. I do wish Evernote had a way to encrypt things, I’d feel a little safer knowing all my tax records were encrypted.
Myself

Are there any plans to add the ability to encrypt notebooks?
http://www.stratford-ontario.com Shakespeare

Even from a Canadian perspective, this seems pretty straight forward. It’s not too difficult to incorporate and use Evernote as an effective means of making things a little more efficient and organized at tax time.

Shakespeare
Stratford Ontario
Ryan

It’s my understanding (though I am not an accountant or anything) that electronic records are acceptable to the IRS *IF* you have bank records that match. ie If you try to claim you bought a computer for $600 for XYZ Store but all you have is a scan of the receipt, that will work if your bank records show a payment of $600 to the XYZ Store on that date.

Not sure about outside the US though.

I also would like to see encrypting a whole notebook before I’d do this. Definatley could be useful, I am horrible at keeping receipts, but if I take a picture on my phone or scan it in my computer when I get home and store it in evernote problem solved.

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