Aside from your CPA or Bookkeeper, who really loves tax season? Generally, we all dread the process of going through our records and rectifying our books and bank statements, so the natural inclination of most people is to put it off for later.

And then comes the reckoning: dealing with it when it’s almost deadline time. If you’ve only gotten around to prepare your paperwork for your bookkeeper or CPA, you may be feeling the pressure of your own lack of organization: piles of paperwork, potentially misplaced statements, and no small amount of stress.

It may be too late to create a system of organization for your 2013 filing, but luckily we’re in February, which is early enough to get prepared for a far less stressful 2014 tax season!

Here are a few organizational tips to take the stress off & make next year’s tax filing is much easier to manage:

  • Mark important tax dates on your calendar. While April 15th is the biggest deadline, you also want to make sure you receive any W-2, 1098 or 1099 forms on time as well. All of these should be mailed to you by January 31st, so if you don’t receive them soon after, contact the company that is supposed to send them to make sure you have them well in advance of the filing date.
  • Decide on a filing system. Whether you use paper clips, accordion folders, color-coded Post-it notes, or some other system, decide on how you’re going to physically group and hold together important paperwork and documents. If you do everything paperless online, that’s great, but be sure to keep electronic records organized in folders. Having a physical paper trail can come in handy in case of an audit.
  • Use your filing system. This may sound obvious, but in order for a filing system to be most effective, you actually have to use it all year and not just when tax season comes around.
  • Decide the method by which you will file. Will you e-file, use a tax filing software program, hand everything over to an accountant, or just fill out the paperwork by hand yourself? Whichever you decide, make sure you have everything in place for using this method well before the April 15th deadline.
Excerpted Organizational Tips Courtesy of Legal Zoom