by CE Wynn

Created on: February 11, 2009   Last Updated: February 27, 2010

Its that time again, tax time! For most, tax time is a stressful period. In a lot of cases this is made worse due to a lack of organisation, and the stress of ensuring the necessary paperwork is collected to claim everything you might be entitled to. Although tax time comes around every year, for most, preparing there annual return is just not thought about until a few months before the return is due.

There are means and ways of making tax time less stressful. Its necessary to be organised, have a system and make sure time is allocated on a regular basis so the paperwork is not left until the end of the year.

* Identify What to Keep?

Before your paperwork can be organised, its necessary to get an idea of what needs to be kept and therefore organised. There is often more then just tax related paperwork that needs to be kept, so it might be worth considering getting any non tax information together, and organise it at the same time.

For the purposes of tax time, it would be worthwhile looking over the previous years tax return and identify what expenses were claimed, and any income related documents that might also be required. Weather your tax return and the paperwork associated to it is straight forward or complex, the method of organising the paperwork for tax time is the same.

* Organise into Categories

Now that all the paperwork is assembled, it is recommended to categories the paperwork. Dumping all your paperwork into a shoe box, and just passing it onto the accountant at the end of the year is an option. However, from personal experience, you will not be have any fans are the accounting office. If your not keen on sorting out your paperwork, why would your accountant, and to make things worse your paying them to do it.

The purposes of getting an idea of what categories to file your paper work in, is to make a decision on the type of system that will improve your filing system. Its necessary to think about the quantity of the documents being filed in each category, and how easy it might be to locate individual documents.

An example of the categories that could be used for an individual with a basic tax return could be:
   - income
   - bank correspondence
   - utilities
   - tax deductions
   - other

If there is a lot of paperwork for a particular category, split the category up further. Income for instance, could be separated into the types of income being received.

The combination of categories are endless,

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