Why SoloTaxMate?

First a simple disclaimer: This is NOT tax filing software!

However, when tax time comes, this program will help you, providing all tax related data, like business expenses and income, medical expenses and charity for example, presented in a standard spreadsheet, showing all income and expense categories summarized per month, per quarter and for the year.

Yes, your data is safely stored on your computer, not in the cloud, not in some inaccessible database, but in a standard spreadsheet, that can still be opened five years from now, without needing our application even.

Who is our target audience?

Although designed for solo practitioners, who file their income on their individual tax returns (1040 with Schedules 1 and C), simple households can also use our software, just to see where the money went. How much money did you spend on groceries, gas, health, dining out, clothing and standard bills?

Where does data come from?

This is also NOT accounting software, although we provide many similar functions, just not so complicated. Your accountant/tax preparer will be very happy though with the data we provide.

We don't make links to your bank accounts. We have tried this ourselves with some accounting software and never had a good feeling about it. Could it be hacked?

So, just like we don't store data in the cloud, we don't attempt to get data from the cloud. We do it the "old-fashioned" way. You determine what accounts you want in SoloTaxmate, and only for those accounts you export the data for the year from your banking software into a file that gets downloaded to your computer. These files you can then import in our software, and let the magic begin!

How are we different?

Okay, let's get a bit personal here. We are a family of four with one parent who is an experienced programmer, one parent with a solo practice, and two kids with interest in programming and web design, who believe every application should work in the cloud. This calls for interesting discussions, but it keeps us young.

Every accounting program we tried was way too complicated and mind boggling unfriendly to users like us. For example, a simple transfer from a checking to a savings account, or from the business to our personal account, provided highly complicated data, almost like we had twice the amount of money, but in reality, the same amount of money was counted twice. In SoloTaxMate we separate all these internal transactions out, they're not income and not an expense.

Also, providing a category on one record required to go in edit mode for that record, select a category from a drop-down, then click Save. Up to the next record and do the same thing. If you made a hundred visits to the post office for the year, this became a true chore, and because of that, mistakes were made because focus was lost.
In SoloTaxMate you sort by description, as provided by the bank, and guess what, all one hundred post office visits are now next to each other. Highlight them all and select the right category, and all are changed at once. Add to that a simple filter, showing only items without a category, and in a matter of hours you assigned thousands of line items, ready for your first report.

Reports? There is really only one, and it gets automatically generated each time you save your data or close the program. See some of the screenshots on this page. But really, it shows all income and expense categories with their counts, and each amount of money summed per category, per month, quarter or for the year. This really helped during Covid when we had to prove that quarter to quarter, we had truly lost income, and thus qualified for federal help.

We mentioned it a few times already, but yes, all your data is stored in a spreadsheet with the XLSX-extension. This means you don't need our software to open it, so you can share it with others that don't have SoloTaxmate and they can still see your data.
This openness is also our weakest link. If you change the integrity of the data structure, then maybe our software can no longer open it. Or you change the amount on one of your line items and balances are suddenly not matching anymore. We have a little trick built in for that. Once all data for the year is in, you can lock in the beginning and ending balance for each account, and the program will warn if it detects that the calculated balance is no longer matching.
Anyway, just to be sure, any time we save the spreadsheet, we also save the data into a file using XML-format. And the program offers an option to load that file in, if you really messed up the spreadsheet.

Well, you get the gist by now. We couldn't find any application that worked for us out there, so we made our own. And it works so well, why not share it with people like us? With all the options on the top of the program you may say it's a bit crowded. But you will like each and every option that you can filter on or perform actions with. And every year we are looking to make it even better, improve the look and feel, and add new features.
Now that we have opened this program up to more people, we welcome your input for improvements. Send us your questions or suggestions and we'll consider them all for a future release.

How much does it cost?

Here is where it gets even better. SoloTaxMate is free to use, each tax year which runs from January 1st to December 31st.

The only limitation we built in the free version is that it will only process data for the first six months. That should give you plenty of time to determine if you like the features, and if you want to continue the use for the remainder of the year. The program offers a simple way to obtain a license from us, after you made a $20 payment here on this website, just skip lunch one day and the program is paid for. Each tax year you will need a new license, but you can start collecting data each new year for six months before you need a license again.