It's a Sunday in March. The tax software is open, blinking at a field called "Box 1," and the document it wants is... somewhere. Some of it came in the mail in January, some of it is a PDF in an email you didn't open, and at least one thing is a photo of a receipt taken in a parking lot last April.
Filing taxes is mostly not math. It's retrieval. The actual work is getting fifteen or twenty pieces of paper — physical and digital — into one place before you start. Do that first, and the rest is typing.
Here's the gather list for a typical US household, and where each item usually hides. (What applies to you depends on your situation — this is a packing list, not tax advice. IRS.gov and your preparer have the final word.)
Income documents: the non-negotiables
You can't start without these, and the good news is they come to you — you just have to notice where they landed.
| Document | What it covers | Where it usually hides |
|---|---|---|
| W-2 | Wages from each employer | Mailed in January, or in the payroll portal (ADP, Workday, Gusto…) |
| 1099-INT / 1099-DIV | Bank interest, dividends | Your bank or brokerage's "Tax documents" page — often not mailed |
| 1099-B | Investment sales | Brokerage portal, usually mid-to-late February |
| 1099-NEC / 1099-K | Freelance and platform income | Email from each client or platform, easy to miss |
| 1099-G | Unemployment, state refunds | State agency website; often online-only |
| SSA-1099 | Social Security benefits | Mailed in January |
Two habits save the most time here. First: one W-2 per employer, so if anyone in the house changed jobs last year, that's two employers and two W-2s — the old one goes to your old address or sits in a payroll portal you no longer log into. Second: banks and brokerages have largely stopped mailing things. If you're waiting for an envelope from your brokerage, you may be waiting forever; log in and look under "Documents" or "Statements."
If anyone in the household freelances, the paper trail is bigger and messier — income and expenses, all year. That's its own project, and there's a separate walkthrough for freelance receipts and taxes.
Deductions and credits: the ones you have to hunt for
Income documents arrive on their own. These don't. Nobody mails you a tidy summary of your charitable donations — you have to reconstruct it.
- Mortgage interest (Form 1098). Your loan servicer sends this in January, by mail or in their portal. If your mortgage was sold last year (it happens constantly), you may get two.
- Property tax records. County statement or your servicer's escrow summary.
- Charitable donations. The scattered one. Email receipts from the big organizations, paper acknowledgments from the local ones, and a text thread about the couch you gave away. Search your email for "donation" and "tax-deductible" — you'll find things you forgot.
- Medical expenses. Only worth gathering if they were large, but if they were, you'll want pharmacy printouts, provider bills, and insurance explanation-of-benefits statements. Patient portals keep most of this.
- Childcare costs. Your provider's name, address, tax ID, and what you paid. Daycare centers hand out a year-end statement if you ask; individual sitters may need a polite email.
- Student loan interest (1098-E) and tuition (1098-T). Loan servicer and school portals respectively — almost always online-only now.
- Last year's return. Not a deduction, but the single most useful reference document while filing. Find it before you start.
The gathering pass: one hour, one pile
Don't gather while you file — you'll do it in eleven frustrated fragments. Gather first, in one sitting:
- The physical sweep. The mail pile, the kitchen drawer, the folder from last year, the glove compartment. Anything tax-shaped goes in one pile.
- The email search. Search for "1099," "W-2," "tax document," "donation," and the names of your bank and brokerage, limited to January and February.
- The portal round. Log into payroll, bank, brokerage, loan servicer, patient portal. Download the PDFs — don't just view them.
- The camera roll. This is where receipts go to die. Donations, medical payments, childcare invoices — photographed with good intentions in the moment, never seen again.
- Photograph the paper. Once everything's in the pile, capture each paper document so the whole set lives in one digital place. Keep the paper originals too — some are worth holding for years, and how long to keep each kind of document is its own short answer.
That camera-roll step is the one people skip, and it's where Paperlock happens to be quietly useful: with your permission, it looks through your photos on the phone, picks out the things that are actually documents, and shows you the candidates to approve. Most people find far more than they expected — including, usually, a few receipts from exactly the year they're filing for. Everything it imports gets read and filed automatically behind Face ID, so come filing time you can just ask "show me donation receipts from last year" instead of scrolling. It's how the whole app works, and it's coming soon to iPhone.
Next spring, in twenty minutes
The shoebox isn't a storage system — it's a deferral system. Every document you tossed in there in July still has to be found, read, and typed in come March. The fix isn't discipline; it's a smaller habit: when something tax-related arrives, capture it then, in the thirty seconds it's already in your hand.
Do that for a year and next spring's "gathering pass" is just opening one place and seeing everything already there, already labeled, already legible. There's a year-round system for tax documents that takes about ten minutes to set up, whether you build it from a Files folder or let an app do the filing for you.
This year, though: one pile, one hour, then file. The shoebox never deserved you anyway.