Your shoebox of tax receipts sorts itself out with this native Mac app for freelancers and solo traders! Drop a receipt onto the app window or snap a photo straight from the app, and it automatically captures income, expenses, GST, home office, depreciation and how much you should set aside for your taxes.
Drag a PDF or photo of a receipt into the app. On-device OCROptical character recognition: the app reads the text off the page image. reads the date, amount, GST and merchant. You just confirm. The original is kept alongside the record.
Invoice-basis GST returns build themselves from your records, 6-monthly or however you file. Every figure traces back to its source documents.
A running income-tax set-aside, so the end of the financial year is a formality, not a scare.
Tag an expense as home office and ShoeboxTaxes spreads the right share (based on floor-area) across power, broadband, rates and interest, with the GST handled properly too. Considering the per square metre rate option? Your choice! Use the app to compare.
Buy a work asset, record it once, and ShoeboxTaxes handles the depreciation from there, using NZ defaults, the $1,000 low-value write-off, and whole-month first-year proration. Less spreadsheet wrangling, more getting on with it. Buy it, record it, done.
Bill in AUD, or buy from overseas? Add Inland Revenue's exchange-rates PDF once, and ShoeboxTaxes uses the right monthly rate for each entry: the official one, not today's random internet number. It even notes which document it used, and when.
Everything lives in one tidy shoebox file: your records, documents and settings. Keep it in iCloud Drive, back it up, or move it wherever you like. No accounts, no lock-in, no mystery cupboard.
ShoeboxTaxes does the clever stuff right there on your Mac: reading receipts, sorting them, and running the numbers. Every calculation runs on-device. The app has no server quietly watching and no telemetry phoning home. If you sync, it's through your own iCloud Drive, using plain files you can open and read yourself. The one thing ShoeboxTaxes ever fetches from the internet is that public exchange-rates document, and only when you ask it to.
No, and that's deliberate.
ShoeboxTaxes does the paperwork, not the filing. It prepares your GST summaries and gives you an indication for what to set aside for income tax. Filing stays where it belongs: with you or your accountant. The app never talks to myIR, so nothing is ever submitted on your behalf.
No. There are no bank logins, no feeds, no third-party aggregators.
Nothing to connect, nothing to break, nothing to leak. A bank transaction tells you that money moved. A receipt or invoice tells you why. Since IRDInland Revenue Department, the New Zealand tax authority. expects the paperwork behind the numbers, ShoeboxTaxes starts with the paperwork. That means you don't end up hunting through emails, drawers and downloads looking for evidence when it's time to file. You just drop in the receipts and invoices you already have, and every record in your books traces back to a real document you can open and inspect yourself.
I built ShoeboxTaxes for myself, a freelancer who wanted his receipts, GST and tax set-aside handled. I wanted to get away from my spreadsheet that I had to duplicate every year and adjust all formulas to match the next year.
Meaning: it isn't tax advice, and there's no guarantee it's correct or that it fits your specific situation. Have your numbers checked by a qualified accountant before you file.
ShoeboxTaxes is written and supported by one person. Write to shoeboxtaxes [at] macsebi [dot] com and the reply comes from me.
Your macOS version, the app version (ShoeboxTaxes ▸ About), what you did and what you expected instead. The app reports nothing home, so your description is genuinely all there is to go on.
Whether your return is right. That one is between you and your accountant. I can fix the app, but I can't check your books.
ShoeboxTaxes will be on the Mac App Store when it's ready.