6 Apps and Services to Automate Your Tax Season

If you don’t like bookkeeping and tax prep, we have good news: you can outsource most of the painful stuff. Whether it’s an app to make things easier, or a service to do the work for you, here are six tools you can use to make your tax season a lot less hectic.

1. Shoeboxed for receipt management.

If you’re staring down a mountain of receipts at year-end, it’s probably time to go digital. With Shoeboxed, you can scan unlimited receipts, prep expense reports, and even record and report mileage.

Really behind on scanning documents? Try one of Shoeboxed’s Magic Envelopes: they’ll send you an envelope that you can stuff with receipts, business cards, and other documents and Shoeboxed will turn it into digital data for you—shipping is free both ways.

2. Gusto for HR and payroll.

Employees can be a surprisingly big administrative drain on your time, between payroll, managing benefits, and other HR tasks. That’s where Gusto comes in.

Gusto can take over all of the above and come tax time, they’ll file both W-2s and 1099s on your behalf. Gusto will also provide employees and contractors with electronic copies of their forms so you can cross one more thing off your tax season to-do list.

3. MileIQ for mileage tracking.

If you do a ton of driving for business but aren’t tracking your mileage, you’re missing out on a potential 54.5 cents tax deduction for every business mile driven.

MileIQ is a simple app that runs in the background and tracks your mileage automatically. You can swipe left or right to differentiate business drives from personal drives and set favorite locations for frequent routes. Come tax season, you can take a quick look at your mileage report and see exactly how many business miles you racked up during the year (and exactly how much you can deduct).

4. FreshBooks for invoicing.

Sometimes invoicing and tracking down client payments takes up as much time as doing the actual project.

FreshBooks solves this by automating invoicing, organizing expenses, and following up with clients. This saves you heaps of time (especially during tax season) and if you’re bookkeeping using the accrual method, FreshBooks will tell you exactly where your accounts receivables sit at year-end.

5. Bench for bookkeeping.

When you’re in a tax crunch and behind on your books, you probably don’t have time to learn QuickBooks, pause everything, and become your own bookkeeper.

Bench’s online service offers a real human bookkeeper to do your books, and simple software to let you keep tabs on your finances.

Haven’t done any bookkeeping this year? Bench can do any catch-up work required and will provide you with tax-ready financials that you or your CPA can use to file taxes.

Going forward, Bench will do your monthly bookkeeping so you’ll never be caught off guard again.

6. Taxfyle for tax filing.

The last and arguably the most important step during tax season? Actually filing those taxes.

Taxfyle matches you with a tax pro based on your business and filing requirements. They’ll handle the tax filing and you can celebrate your newfound tax-time freedom.

Whether you're in the business of fitness, beauty or integrative health, we have checklists available to help make tax season easy for you. Check out our Tax Breaks Every Fitness Business Owner Should Know, Common Tax Deductions for Salons and Spas and Tax Breaks for Integrative Health Business Owners checklists by clicking on the links. 

This information contained herein does not constitute financial, legal, or other professional advice and is meant to be used solely for informational purposes. It does not take into account your specific circumstances and should be not acted on without full understanding of your current situation, future goals and/or objectives by a qualified professional. Mindbody and Bench assume no liability for actions taken in reliance upon the information contained herein.