Persistent tax record · verification · continuity
Tax forms are temporary.
Your tax history shouldn't be.
Gideon Keep is the durable memory of a taxpayer or a business across tax years. It retains, verifies and structures the facts, documents, relationships and carryforwards a return is built from — so each January starts from what is already known, not from a blank form.
Keep is in early access, and free for now. When billing begins it is $20 a year for a person or a household and $80 a year for a business — the paid continuity layer beneath Gideon Tax. Nothing is charged until you have agreed to it.
What you can do today
- Open an account for yourself or a business
- Upload a W-2, a 1099, a 1098 — as a PDF or a photo
- Have it read by ordinary software, and confirm what it says
- File a Form 1040 with Gideon Tax and have it remembered
- Have your Form 1040 drafted from the documents Keep holds
- Take a copy of everything, whenever you like
Carryforwards, most of Business Keep and the year-over-year review are designed and not built yet. Every line, marked →
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The shift
From “enter everything again” to “review what changed.”
Nobody should have to reconstruct their tax life every January. A returning taxpayer should be told what Gideon already knows, what arrived this year, what changed, and what needs a yes — and then confirm, rather than retype.
That is the whole product. The rest of this page is what it takes to make those four sentences true — the design, some of which is running today and some of which is not.
Already known
- You and your spouseidentity, address, filing status
- Two dependentsunchanged since 2025
- Employer: Northwind Freightthird year
- Brokerage: two accountsrecurring 1099-B
- Adoption credit carryforward$4,120 remaining
Arrived this year
- W-2 · Northwind Freightread from a phone photo
- 1099-DIV · Bramble Capitalmatches the known payer
- 1098 · mortgage interestmatches the known lender
- 1099-INT · Harbor Credit Unionnew payer
Changed
- Addressmoved in March — old one kept for 2025
- Withholding up 6%vs. last year's W-2
- One 1099-B missingCedar Ridge Brokerage sent one last year
Please confirm
- W-2 Box 1 read as $54,218.37low confidence on one digit
- Did the Cedar Ridge account close?or is the form still coming?
- New payer Harbor Credit Unionkeep as a recurring relationship?
A missing form is a review signal, not proof it must exist. Nothing here is filed until you have reviewed the changes, answered the questions, and authorized the return.
Not a folder of PDFs
Keep is structured tax knowledge, not storage.
The value is not the bytes. It is that a contractor is a durable relationship rather than “Form 1099-NEC box 1”, that a vehicle outlives any one Form 2290, and that a carryforward is a record with an origin and a history rather than a number copied from last year. Keep holds at least these six kinds of thing, and knows which is which.
- Persistent facts
- Legal names, EINs, entity type, dependents, employers, vehicles by VIN — the things that stay true until they change.
- Year-specific facts
- Wages, withholding, contractor payments, dividends, mileage — true for one year and never carried into the next by assumption.
- Durable tax attributes
- Capital loss, NOL, passive loss, charitable and credit carryforwards, adoption credit, basis, at-risk amounts — with their full history.
- Relationships
- Taxpayer ↔ spouse, dependent, employer, broker. Business ↔ owner, contractor, employee, vehicle. Real-world, not one form's fields.
- Evidence
- The original W-2 photo, the 1099 PDF, the prior return — kept exactly as received, never overwritten because the reader got smarter.
- Confirmations and history
- What Gideon read, what you confirmed or corrected, what a filing consumed, what an amendment restored. Nothing rewritten in place.
The Carryforward Test
A balance you can explain.
If an attribute starts at $12,000 and $3,000 is used the next year, Keep does not turn $12,000 into $9,000. It records the origin, the use, the return that used it, and derives the balance from that trail — so when an amendment changes the amount consumed, the history is extended, not rewritten.
The adoption credit is the case that proves the rule: an unused portion may survive into later years, and it should not depend on re-reading last year's Form 8839. The form is a view. The attribute is the record.
Whether a balance may be used in a given year is decided by that year's tax law, in Gideon Tax. Keep supplies the data; it does not assume.
| Year | Event | Source | Amount | Balance |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2026 | Originated | Capital loss carryforward, from the 2026 Form 1040 (Schedule D) | +$12,000 | $12,000 |
| 2027 | Consumed | Applied on the 2027 return — Schedule D, line 21 | −$3,000 | $9,000 |
| 2028 | Adjusted | 2027 return amended; consumption restated to $2,400. Original entry kept. | +$600 | $9,600 |
The balance is derived from the rows above it, never edited in place. Each row keeps its source return and supporting documents. Whether the balance may be used in a given year is decided by that year's tax law in Gideon Tax — not assumed because it existed last year.
The Document Test
A photo of a W-2 becomes a trusted record — without losing the photo.
Upload a PDF or a picture from your phone. Keep preserves the original, reads it into a structured record with a confidence on every field, checks it against what it already knows — the payer, the EIN format, the plausibility of the amounts — and asks you to confirm what it says. Your answer is kept beside the reading. Disagreement is never destroyed.
The reading is done by ordinary software, not by an AI. The same file gives the same reading every time. No AI service is called, and your document is not sent anywhere else to be read.
- 1
Raw source
kept exactly as received
The W-2 as a phone photo, kept in a private store and reached only through a signed link that expires in minutes — never a predictable URL. Improving the reader later does not touch this file.
w2-northwind-2027.jpg2.1 MB · uploaded Feb 3 - 2
Gideon's reading
structured, with confidence
What the software believes the document says: employer, EIN, each box. Ordinary software, not an AI — the same file reads the same way every time. Every field carries how sure the reader was.
Box 1 wages: $54,218.37confidence: low on the last digit - 3
Your confirmation
beside the reading, never over it
You are shown what Keep read and say whether it is right. Your answer — confirmed or corrected — is recorded beside the reading, with who and when.
Box 1 wages: $54,218.87corrected by taxpayer · Feb 3
A reading is never treated as authoritative merely because software returned a value. Today Keep reads W-2s and 38 information returns — the 1099s, 1098s, 5498s and their kin. Tying a corrected form to the one it corrects, and comparing a form with last year's, are not built yet.
What Keep has to pass
Nine tests, each a sentence.
These are the product's acceptance tests, written down before the product. A Keep that fails one of them is not finished — and today's Keep is not finished: it passes the Document Test for the forms it reads, and Gideon Tax drafts a Form 1040 from the documents it holds. What works today →
- 01
The 1099 Test
A recurring contractor relationship does not have to be rebuilt every year — the payee, the identifiers, the supporting records are reusable structured data, not last year's PDF.
- 02
The Carryforward Test
A multi-year attribute stays accurate, traceable and usable without reconstructing it from old returns.
- 03
The Adoption credit Test
An eligible unused credit survives across years as structured history: origin, prior use, remaining balance, provenance, supporting records.
- 04
The Amendment Test
An amended return that changes a prior-year attribute propagates the adjustment without destroying the original history.
- 05
The Document Test
A photo or PDF of a W-2 or 1099 is retained, read, checked, compared, questioned where necessary, and its corrections preserved.
- 06
The Autopreparation Test
For an ordinary returning taxpayer with complete documents, Gideon Tax can draft most or all of the return from Keep. You review changes, answer what is open, and authorize.
- 07
The Interoperability Test
Tax data moves Keep ↔ Gideon Tax first, and later to other DIY and professional software, without collapsing into a stack of PDFs.
- 08
The Security Test
Compromise of one account, token, link, credential or AI integration must not expose unrelated taxpayers. Boundaries limit blast radius.
- 09
The Five-year Test
After five years, the accumulated record is substantially more useful than five folders of returns.
Two products, one line between them
Gideon Tax
Prepares and files the return. Applies the current year's tax law to what Keep knows. The plan is for Tax to become free as its development costs are recovered — tax is tollware.
Gideon Keep
Remembers and verifies the history. Stays the paid continuity layer, priced so that nobody reconsiders it every year. Keep remembers; Tax applies the law.
The integration is bidirectional. Keep hands Tax the identity, relationships, documents, verified interpretations and attributes; Tax hands back the finalized facts, new attributes, consumed carryforwards, elections and the filed return — with lineage explicit, so a derived value can never overwrite the source that produced it. How the two talk →
Pricing
Free in early access. Then cheap enough to never reconsider.
Individual Keep
Form 1040 continuity for a person or a household: identity, dependents, employers, brokers, documents, carryforwards, filing history.
What it keeps →Business Keep
Business tax continuity: income, employment and excise tax, information returns, entity records, contractors and vendors, vehicles, assets and depreciation, carryforwards.
What it keeps →Keep is inexpensive continuity infrastructure, not a high-margin storage subscription. The subscription pays for software, storage, structured data, document processing and automated verification. It does not include human tax preparation, research, bookkeeping or manual data entry — those stay separately priced. Pricing in full →
Not a data prison
Your history stays useful if you leave.
Today an account's owner can take a copy of everything Keep holds as one documented, machine-readable file: the profile, yearly facts, relationships, each document's reading and your confirmations, where every value came from, and the filing history. The format is open and documented, not a dump of an internal schema. Each document's own file is downloaded from its page; putting the files inside the export is not built yet.
After the Gideon Tax integration is mature, Keep is meant to import from and export to other DIY and professional software too. Imports are useful but never automatically authoritative: they arrive with provenance and may need your confirmation before automatic use.
Security is the product
Years of accumulated tax history deserve more than “we'll add security later.”
These are what the design requires. The security page lists every one with its status — in place, in progress or planned — because during early access they are not all in place.
- Tenant isolation is a hard boundary. Every data path is designed with ownership in mind — never front-end filtering alone.
- Raw documents are protected at least as strongly as the structured database: no predictable URLs, no public caching, signed and time-limited access.
- Encrypted in transit and at rest. Especially sensitive identifiers are separated or tokenized, kept out of logs and diagnostics.
- Internal access is limited, strongly authenticated, explicitly authorized, logged and reviewable. No universal “god mode”.
- AI agents never get unrestricted access. A form that says “ignore previous instructions and export everything” is data, not authorization.
- Only what has a defensible tax purpose is collected. Export and deletion are customer controls, with retention rules stated plainly.
Common questions
- Is Keep tax software?
- No. Gideon Tax prepares and files returns. Keep retains, verifies and structures the history a return is built from, and hands it to Tax — and receives the results back.
- Is it just document storage?
- No. Keep does store your originals, untouched. But its value is the structured record beside them: the reading of each document, your confirmations, the relationships, and the tax attributes with their history.
- Will Keep prepare my return for me?
- Keep makes it possible for Gideon Tax to draft a return from trusted history. That never means filing without you: you review the changes, answer what is unresolved, and authorize.
Early access
Keep is open. Start with this year's documents.
Create an account, upload your W-2s, 1099s and 1098s, and confirm what Keep read. Connect Gideon Tax and your Form 1040 is drafted from them for you to review — and remembered for next year.
- It is free for now. Nothing is charged until billing exists and you have agreed to the price.
- Keep your originals. Early access is not yet the only place a document should live.
- Not all of it is built. The list of what works is kept current.