FAQ

Plain answers.

If something below is wrong or missing, email hello@gideonkeep.com.

Is Gideon Keep tax software?: No. Gideon Tax prepares and files returns. Keep retains, verifies and structures the information, documents, relationships and tax attributes a return is built from — and receives the results of each filing back, so the next one starts from known data.
Is it document storage?: Keep does keep your original documents, exactly as received, and never overwrites them. But that is the evidence, not the product. The product is the structured record beside each document: what Gideon read from it, what you confirmed or corrected, which relationship it belongs to, and which tax-year facts and attributes it supports.
What is a carryforward, and why does Keep make so much of it?: A tax attribute that survives across years: a capital loss carryforward, a net operating loss, a suspended passive loss, a charitable or credit carryforward, an adoption credit. Most software treats it as a number to copy from last year's form. Keep treats it as a record with an origin, every amount used and by which return, every adjustment, and a balance derived from that history. That is the difference between remembering and understanding.
The adoption credit specifically?: Yes, explicitly. An unused portion may continue into later years, and it should not depend on parsing an old Form 8839 each year. Keep holds the credit as its own attribute — originating year, amounts determined and used, remaining balance, the adoption record and documents, any amendment — and makes it available to that year's tax software, subject to that year's rules.
Will it prepare my return automatically?: Keep is built to make that possible: a sufficiently ordinary returning taxpayer with complete documents should have most or all of a draft prepared from what Gideon already knows. That never means filing without you. You review what changed, answer what is unresolved, and authorize. Keep also keeps clear which facts are high-confidence, imported, carried forward, awaiting reconfirmation, inferred, calculated or in conflict.
What happens when I upload a photo of a W-2?: Keep preserves the original, reads it into a structured record with a confidence on each field, validates it, compares it with what it already knows — the employer, last year's form, the EIN format, the plausibility of the amounts — and asks you about the fields that need it. Your answer is recorded beside the reading. If the reader was wrong and you corrected it, all three states survive.
What about a corrected 1099?: The original is not deleted. Keep records the corrected form, understands which one is controlling for preparation, and keeps the history. Duplicated, amended and superseded documents are modeled the same way.
Does the subscription include a person?: No. It pays for software, storage, structured data, document processing, automated verification and reasonable product support. Human tax preparation, research, consulting, bookkeeping, reconciliation and manual data entry are not inside a $20 or $80 subscription and are priced separately. That is how the price stays honest.
Why is it so cheap?: Because the value is continuity, not bytes, and continuity only works if you never reconsider it. The plan is for Gideon Tax to become free as its development costs are recovered — “tax is tollware” — with Keep as the paid layer underneath, priced so it is never the thing you cut.
Does it renew automatically?: Yes. Individual Keep is $20 a year and Business Keep is $80 a year, renewing automatically. You can cancel at any time and export everything first.
Can I leave with my data?: Yes, and in a useful form. Documented, machine-readable export of your profile, yearly facts, attributes and carryforward histories, relationships, document metadata, provenance and filing history, plus copies of the raw documents. Keep is meant to be worth keeping, not hard to leave.
Does Keep work with software other than Gideon Tax?: Gideon Tax first, in both directions. After that integration is mature, Keep is meant to import from and export to other DIY and professional tax software, accounting and payroll systems, and authorized tax AI, where technically and legally practical. Imports arrive with provenance and are never automatically authoritative.
Can an AI assistant read my Keep?: Only with your authorization, scoped by data category, action, duration, application and purpose. Reading a document, reading facts, suggesting a correction, writing one, preparing, authorizing, transmitting, exporting and deleting are distinct permissions. Text inside an uploaded document is never an instruction.
Does Keep give tax advice?: No. Verification is a software check against what Keep knows and against the document's own consistency — not an opinion on what you should claim. Whether an attribute may be used in a given year is decided by that year's law inside Gideon Tax, and the responsibility for a correct return stays with you and your preparer.
What if I delete my account?: Customer-owned Keep data can be deleted where legally and operationally permitted. Records Gideon must retain as an e-file provider, filing logs, compliance and payment records may have different retention rules, and Keep will tell you which is which rather than implying everything vanishes.