Interoperability
Keep talks to Gideon Tax in both directions — and is not a data prison.
Today the exchange covers Form 1040.
Works todayYou connect Keep and Gideon Tax yourself, from inside Keep, and can turn it off whenever you like. A Form 1040 filed with Gideon Tax is handed back: who was on it, the address, the employers, banks, brokers and lenders, and — once the IRS accepts it — the return's figures. And a Form 1040 is prepared from Keep: the people, the address, the employers, and every W-2, 1099 and 1098 Keep holds for the year, each on the page for its form — whether or not you have filed with Gideon Tax before. The draft is yours to go through and change.
Not yet: carryforwards and elections in either direction, the filed return itself, the forms the return has no page for (a 1099-K, a W-2G, a K-1), and every return that is not a Form 1040. The two lists below are the whole design.
Keep → Gideon Tax
- taxpayer and entity identity
- dependents and relationships
- employers, contractors, brokers
- vehicles and assets
- tax documents and their verified interpretations
- carryforwards, basis and other attributes
- historical filing information
Gideon Tax → Keep
- finalized tax-year facts
- newly created tax attributes
- updated carryforwards and amounts consumed
- elections
- filing results and the filed return
- provenance
- new relationships or durable facts discovered during preparation
Preventing circular corruption
A derived value can never overwrite its source.
Two-way sync has a failure mode: one wrong calculated number flows back and recursively overwrites the record that produced it. Keep keeps lineage explicit and distinguishes authoritative source information, taxpayer-confirmed facts, imported values, tax-software calculations, filed-return values, and derived carryforward balances. A remaining balance is a derived value; its calculation history stays traceable.
Portable tax data
Documented, machine-readable, yours.
Today an account's owner can export profile data, yearly facts, relationships, each document's reading, provenance, confirmation status and filing history as one documented file, with identification numbers by their last four digits. The documents themselves are downloaded one at a time; putting them in the export is not built yet. Where an industry-standard format exists and is capable enough, Keep will use it. Where none is, the format is open and documented, and not designed around an internal database schema.
Other tax software
Useful even if you file elsewhere.
After the Gideon Tax integration is mature, Keep is meant to import from and export to consumer DIY software, professional preparation software, accounting and payroll systems, information-return tools, document management and authorized tax AI systems, where technically and legally practical. An imported prior-year return can populate identity, dependents, business information, carryforwards and filing history — with the provenance “imported from external software” attached, and confirmation required before automatic use.
API-friendly by design
The design. Today one application, Gideon Tax, may ask, and no AI agent has any access.
Questions an authorized application should be able to ask.
Stable domain interfaces rather than UI-specific ones — so Gideon Tax, professional tools, and user-authorized AI agents can ask these without understanding the layout of the Keep screen:
- What W-2s does this taxpayer have for this year?
- Which W-2 fields were taxpayer-confirmed?
- Which documents have unresolved extraction uncertainty?
- Which employers existed last year but not this year?
- Which contractors require confirmation?
- Which vehicles remain active?
- What changed since the previous filing?
- Which documents support this amount?
- What carryforwards remain?
- What adoption credit carryforward is potentially available?
- Which attributes require review before preparing this year's return?
- Is enough trusted information available to autoprepare this return?
Access is a grant, not a fact of having credentials: reading, extracting, proposing, writing, preparing, approving, authorizing, transmitting, exporting and deleting are distinct permissions.
Keep ↔ Gideon Tax first. Then everyone else.
The Interoperability Test: tax data moves without collapsing into a stack of PDFs.
Free while Keep is in early access. The price when billing begins: $20 a year for a person or a household, $80 a year for a business.