If your tax seasons have involved too much paper wrangling, consider throwing out your file cabinets and going paperless. Everything you have to track for the IRS you can also keep digitally.
Here are some tips to best digitize, back up and safely toss your paper records in favor of digital ones. You can also find a full list of Wirecutter’s best tools for a paperless home office here.
Scan straight to the cloud
A mobile scanning app that can produce clean copies can free you of the tyranny of paper scraps.
Gil Charney, director at the Tax Institute at H&R Block, said, “The IRS will accept electronic digital versions of documents provided that the documents are retrievable and legible, so a poorly scanned document is not going to suffice if important elements of that document are not readable.” (Disclosure: Wirecutter recommends H&R Block’s free service in our guide to the best tax software.)
But considering the sensitive information you capture for tax season, it’s important to choose a service that doesn’t put your documents at risk. We recommend the Scanbot Pro app for both Android and iOS because it produces good-quality scans but doesn’t transmit your data to its own servers.
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