The Year-Round Tax Maintenance Calendar for Dallas Households

Tax season is a deadline; tax maintenance is what happens the other ten months. The filers who have a calm February are not the ones with the best software — they are the ones whose documents, basis records, and payment estimates were already in order before anyone asked for them.

This Is Not the Deadline Table

Due dates, safe harbors, and penalty mechanics belong to the pages that own them, and repeating those tables here would only make two pages disagree eventually. What follows is the maintenance layer: what to do, in which quarter, to keep your file in a state where filing is a read rather than a reconstruction. Where a step depends on a deadline, the step links to the page that carries the current numbers.

The Quarterly Fifteen-Minute Routine

Four things, four times a year. Every one of them takes less time than a phone call in April:

1. File what arrived. Move every statement, K-1, portal export, and receipt into this year's folder. Loose paper is how a 1099 gets forgotten until the notice shows up two years later.
2. Log what changed. One running note: a new dependent, a move, a refinance, a job change, an option exercise, an inheritance, a business started or closed. Life changes drive most filing positions, and they are invisible in December if nobody wrote them down.
3. Re-check the estimate. Compare year-to-date withholding and any estimated payments against what the year now looks like. A raise in March is a liability question in August, not in February.
4. Move the loose end. Every quarter leaves one open item. Close it in the quarter it appears rather than carrying it into the next one.

January to March: The Pre-Filing Sweep

• Reconcile every information return against your own records before the return is prepared, not after the IRS does it for you.
• Pull last year's return and copy the carryforwards forward: capital loss carryovers, charitable carryovers, basis of property, suspended passive losses, net operating losses.
• Collect the support for anything that is easy to claim and hard to defend: basis on securities you sold, receipts for equipment placed in service, contemporaneous mileage records.
• Decide, in writing, whether the return is being filed on time or extended — the extension decision is a maintenance choice, not a failure. The extension page carries the mechanics and the payment rule that most people get wrong.

April to June: Post-Filing Reconciliation

The weeks after filing are the cheapest time of year to catch a mistake, because everyone involved still remembers the return:

• Compare the as-filed return against your account transcript. If a figure landed somewhere unexpected, an amended return costs far less now than a CP2000 costs later.
• Fix the administrative layer: current address, bank account for direct deposit, and any name change that has not reached the Social Security Administration.
• Note the statute of limitations date for the year you just closed. It is the clock on how long records need to stay reachable, and it moves if the return was filed late.
• Start the file for the year that just began — a folder and a running list, nothing more.

July to September: The Mid-Year Checkup

This is the quarter that decides whether January is quiet:

• Withholding check. Two incomes, a bonus, or a mid-year raise are the classic underwithholding cases. Run a projection and adjust the W-4 now, while there is still payroll left to fix it.
• Safe-harbor check. If you make estimated payments, confirm which safe harbor you are actually aiming at rather than assuming last year's number still works. The quarterly guide owns that arithmetic.
• Entity season. Pass-through returns on extension come due in this window, and a K-1 that arrives late is a maintenance failure on somebody's calendar.
• Digitize. Scan the paper that matters and put it where the fire cannot reach it. A records loss is a January problem created in July.

October to December: The Year-End Cleanup

Most tax moves have a hard end at December 31, and the ones that matter are decided by whether you acted, not by how much you intended to:

• Place equipment in service before year-end if you are counting on the write-off; an invoice dated December 31 for something delivered in January generally does not qualify.
• Contribution deadlines differ by account. Individual retirement account and health savings account contributions for the tax year generally run to the filing deadline; SEP contributions can follow an extension; employee deferrals to a solo 401(k) do not wait for April. The retirement page carries the account-by-account detail.
• Bunching and timing. If you are near the threshold between the standard deduction and itemizing, December is when the decision is made — the itemizing page runs the arithmetic.
• Harvesting. Realized gains and losses are fixed at year-end, so the review has to happen while there is still a trading day left.
• Consolidate the year's documents into one place, including the notices you received and the elections you made.

How Long to Keep What

A retention schedule removes the "should I keep this?" decision entirely:

• As-filed returns: permanently. They are the cheapest record of every carryforward you will ever need.
• Supporting receipts and statements: generally three years after the return is filed, six years if income was substantially understated, longer if nothing was filed.
• Basis records for property you still own: as long as you own it, plus the limitation period after the sale. The closing statement from a purchase thirty years ago is what proves today's gain.
• Anything supporting a carryforward: until the carryforward is fully used.

The Five Maintenance Failures That Cost Real Money

1. A late K-1 or corrected 1099 that never reaches the preparer because the year folder closed in April.
2. Basis nobody recorded, so a gain is computed from a remembered price instead of a document.
3. Underwithholding discovered in February, when the only remaining fix is a payment.
4. Records stored in exactly one place, which is also the place that floods.
5. A missed contribution or purchase deadline that was decided in December but acted on in January.

None of these are complicated problems. They are calendar problems, and the calendar is the one part of tax planning that costs nothing to run. If a quarterly checkup turns up something you cannot price on your own, call (214) 555-0188 before the next deadline rather than after it.

Frequently Asked Questions