Organize your tax documents on your Mac.
1099s, W-2s, filed returns, deductible receipts, escrow and property-tax statements — dropped in, read on-device, and filed into the folders you already use. Nothing is uploaded anywhere.
How do you organize tax documents on a Mac?
ShabuBox is a document management app for Mac that handles it for you. Drag in your 1099s, receipts, and past returns — or scan them straight from a document scanner — and on-device AI reads every page with Apple Vision OCR, pulls out the dates, amounts, and names, renames the file from its contents, and files it into your existing tax folders. Then you can search every word with ⌘K, or ask a plain-English question and get an answer with citations back to the page it came from. Your documents never leave your Mac.
From a pile of paper to a tax folder that files itself.
Four steps, all of them local. There is no account to make and no server to run.
Get everything in
Drag the PDFs your bank, broker, and payroll portal give you straight into ShabuBox. Paper — mailed 1099s, closing statements, a shoebox of receipts — goes in through a scanner: ScanSnap over USB, any eSCL / AirScan network scanner, or a watched scan-to-folder for anything else. Crooked pages are deskewed and cropped on the way in.
It reads the page
Apple Vision OCR reads every page, including photographed receipts, so even a scan with no embedded text becomes searchable. On-device models work out what the document is — a tax form, a statement, an invoice — and extract the dates, currency amounts, and the people and organizations named on it. The file gets renamed from its own contents.
It files itself
The auto-filer learns from where you already put things — if your 2025 tax folder is where W-2s go, that’s where the next one goes. It files when it’s confident, suggests when it’s close, and abstains when it isn’t, so nothing is quietly buried in the wrong year. Everything new lands in the Inbox first if you’d rather confirm in a batch.
Find it again in April
⌘K searches every OCR’d word across files, notes, entities, and reminders — not just filenames. Or ask a question in plain English and get an answer where every claim carries a citation to the exact passage, so you can click through and check the source yourself before you put a number on a form.
The paperwork a tax year actually generates.
- 1099s of every flavor — NEC, INT, DIV, B, MISC — and W-2s.
- Filed returns and their attachments, year by year.
- Deductible receipts, including photographed ones.
- Mortgage interest and escrow analysis statements.
- Property-tax bills and assessment notices.
- Charitable donation acknowledgements.
- Brokerage and bank year-end summaries.
- Business invoices and expense records.
Custom fields help here. You can define your own fields per document type — text, number, currency, date, or yes/no — so a tax form can carry the details that matter to you. Filter the list to that type and it becomes a sortable table, one column per field. Reminders sync with Apple Reminders if you want a nudge before a filing deadline.
Your tax return is about as personal as paper gets.
Which is exactly why none of it is uploaded. OCR, document understanding, entity extraction, and chat all run on your Mac. There is no account, so there is nowhere for your documents to be held. Pull the network cable and importing, reading, filing, and searching still work. Your files stay ordinary files in ordinary folders you can open in Finder — the app’s database is only an index over them, and it can be rebuilt.
Not tax advice. ShabuBox organizes documents and answers questions from what they actually say — it doesn’t prepare returns, calculate what you owe, or give tax advice. Check anything it tells you against the cited page, and talk to a professional about the actual filing.
Common questions about tax documents
Can ShabuBox sort my 1099s and W-2s into the right tax year?
Yes. On-device models extract the dates printed on each document, and the auto-filer learns from where you have filed similar documents before — so a new 1099 goes to the year folder you would have put it in. When it isn’t confident it suggests instead of filing, and when it still isn’t sure it leaves the document in the Inbox for you.
Does it read photographed and scanned receipts, or only PDFs with text?
Both. PDFs with embedded text use that text, and anything without it — a scan, a photographed receipt — is read with Apple Vision OCR, the same technology behind Live Text. Every recognized word goes into the full-text index, so a receipt you photographed is searchable by what’s printed on it.
Do my tax documents get uploaded anywhere?
No. OCR, document understanding, entity extraction, and chat all run on your Mac, and there is no account to hold your data. Your documents stay as ordinary files in ordinary folders on your own disk. You can turn off Wi-Fi and Ethernet and importing, reading, filing, and searching all still work.
Can I ask what I paid in property tax last year?
You can ask questions like that in plain English, and the answer comes back with an [n] citation to the exact passage it came from, so you can open the source page and confirm the number yourself. Treat it as a way to find the figure on the page quickly, not as a calculation to file from.
Does ShabuBox give tax advice or file my return?
No. It is a document management app: it organizes your paperwork and answers questions from what those documents say. It does not prepare or file returns, compute what you owe, or provide tax advice. For that, use tax software or a professional.
Try it on last year’s paperwork.
Every feature free for 30 days. Then $24.99, once — no subscription, no account, nothing that renews.