How it works
A year inside Keep is a loop, not a season.
- 01
Remember
Persistent facts and relationships live in Keep: who you are, your dependents, your business and its EIN, your employers, your brokers, your contractors, your vehicles by VIN. Persistent does not mean immutable — an address change keeps the old address, its effective date, and which filings used it.
- 02
Receive
Documents arrive as they do in life: a PDF from a broker, a downloaded statement, a photo of a W-2, a scan of a K-1. The original is kept exactly as received. It is evidence, and it is never overwritten because the reader improves later.
- 03
Read
Keep extracts a structured interpretation — employer, EIN, every box, tax year — and attaches a confidence to each field. The reading is what Gideon believes the document says. It is never treated as authoritative just because the parser returned a value.
- 04
Check
The reading is validated and compared with what Keep already knows: does the payer match a known record, is the EIN well-formed, are the amounts plausible, is this a duplicate or a corrected form, does it conflict with last year, is a recurring payer unexpectedly different?
- 05
Confirm
You are asked about what matters — “We read box 1 as $54,218.37. Correct?” — not every character. Your confirmation or correction is recorded beside the reading, with who and when. Raw, read, and confirmed all survive.
- 06
Carry
Durable tax attributes — carryforwards, basis, suspended losses, the adoption credit — are kept as records with history: origin, amounts used and by which filing, adjustments, remaining balance, expiry rules, supporting documents, review status.
- 07
Prepare
Gideon Tax asks Keep for the facts, documents, verified interpretations, relationships and attributes it needs, applies the current year's tax law, and drafts the return. You review what changed, answer what is unresolved, and authorize. Nothing files itself.
- 08
Return
After preparation or filing, results flow back: finalized year facts, new attributes, consumed carryforwards, elections, the filed return, and any durable fact discovered along the way — each with its lineage, so a derived value can never overwrite the source it came from.
Steps 2 to 5, on one document
Three states of one W-2, none of them lost.
- 1
Raw source
kept exactly as received
The W-2 as a phone photo, stored under a signed, time-limited link — never a predictable URL. Improving the reader later does not touch this file.
w2-northwind-2027.jpg2.1 MB · uploaded Feb 3 - 2
Gideon's reading
structured, with confidence
What the software believes the document says: employer, EIN, each box. Every field carries how sure the reader was, and which fields disagree with what Keep already knew.
Box 1 wages: $54,218.37confidence: low on the last digit - 3
Your confirmation
targeted, not exhaustive
You are asked about the few fields that need it, not every character. Your answer — confirmed or corrected — is recorded beside the reading, with who and when.
Box 1 wages: $54,218.87corrected by taxpayer · Feb 3
Step 7, from your side
What a returning year asks of you.
For a returning customer, Keep can identify:
- what remains unchanged
- what likely carries forward
- what tax attributes remain available
- what current-year documents have arrived
- what requires confirmation
- what expired, and what was consumed
- what is new
- what differs from the previous year
- what appears inconsistent
- what remains unresolved before preparation
A missing form is a review signal, not proof it exists. “Last year you received a 1099 from this payer. Did the relationship end, or are you still waiting?”
Already known
- You and your spouseidentity, address, filing status
- Two dependentsunchanged since 2025
- Employer: Northwind Freightthird year
- Brokerage: two accountsrecurring 1099-B
- Adoption credit carryforward$4,120 remaining
Arrived this year
- W-2 · Northwind Freightread from a phone photo
- 1099-DIV · Bramble Capitalmatches the known payer
- 1098 · mortgage interestmatches the known lender
- 1099-INT · Harbor Credit Unionnew payer
Changed
- Addressmoved in March — old one kept for 2025
- Withholding up 6%vs. last year's W-2
- One 1099-B missingCedar Ridge Brokerage sent one last year
Please confirm
- W-2 Box 1 read as $54,218.37low confidence on one digit
- Did the Cedar Ridge account close?or is the form still coming?
- New payer Harbor Credit Unionkeep as a recurring relationship?
A missing form is a review signal, not proof it must exist. Nothing here is filed until you have reviewed the changes, answered the questions, and authorized the return.
North-star principles
What Keep will never do.
- Never make you re-enter a durable fact Gideon already knows unless there is a legitimate reason to reconfirm it.
- Never assume an old year-specific fact is still true merely because Gideon remembers it.
- Never reduce a multi-year attribute to a number copied from last year's form.
- Never discard the raw document after creating Gideon's interpretation of it.
- Never treat machine extraction as authoritative merely because the parser returned a value.
- Never make a future application reverse-engineer what Keep could have preserved when it was first known.
- Never lock your history inside Gideon when it can reasonably be exported in a useful form.
- Never let convenience weaken the security boundaries around taxpayer data.
Tax forms are temporary. Tax history is durable. Keep should securely preserve, verify and understand that history well enough that future returns can increasingly prepare themselves.
Every year of Keep makes the next one shorter.
Join the waitlist for Individual Keep or Business Keep. We write when it opens, and not much otherwise.