Claude Just Replaced Doing Taxes Forever! (Tutorial)

Tax season is right around the corner, and most people scrambling to do their taxes just end up paying $300 to $500 for an accountant they might see once a year, or they spend 3 to 5 hours fighting TurboTax and getting hit with add-ons at the end. And sadly, the IRS makes this feel complicated on purpose so that companies like TurboTax and HR Block can make money off your confusion. So I thought, what if I could just get Claude to do it for me and show you how to do it? So we'll be doing this in 3 steps: the GPS framework and get AI to file your taxes. Let me break these down. So first, G is gather. Before anyone touches your taxes, you need right documents. So like your W-2, like your job income, anything you earn on the side, some mortgage docs, or if you made any donations. This is what you're normally paying your accountants to chase you for. That's the gather phase. And I'll show you how you can get Claude to help you with all of these, gather all your docs and put it in one place. Then we move on to process, P. This is where the accountant takes all the information they gathered and then compile it into one government document called the Form 1040. Don't worry about it, but I'll show you how Claude can make it do that as well. Now, after it's processed, we need to send this to the IRS. So there's a service called FreeTaxUSA we can use, but you need to fill in all your details, which is pretty tedious. So we can get Claude to open up FreeTaxUSA in the browser, log in, and fill out every field automatically so you can review it. And even if you have zero technical background, you'll be able to do this because all we're going to be doing is simply speaking to Claude. Now, to walk through this properly, we're going to do this for a real person— well, a fake person. I can't do my own taxes on camera, so we're going to be using Alex. So let's say Alex is a 35-year-old marketing coordinator. He makes $65,000 a year. And to add some complexity for Claude, let's say he owns a home, so he has a mortgage and mortgage interest he can deduct. And then let's say he made some money doing some freelance work on the side and made a couple donations. Now, like most people, let's say his documents are scattered across Gmail, Google Drive, his computer, or whatnot. Now, if I told you to sort all this out and file your taxes, most people would freeze. They'd see W-2, 1099, all this side income deductions and all this stuff, and it feels like a lot. But with what I'm about to show you, it's going to be super simple. So let's dive into G. All right, so first things first, we're going to need Claude. And to use Claude, I recommend use this thing that's Claude Desktop. And hit the first link. Okay, great. Now we install Claude. If you open up Claude, it's going to look like this. And what we're going to be using for this is this thing called Cowork. So we're going to go here and press Cowork. All right. And to get Cowork, you probably need the $20 Claude plan, and this should be enough for you to get rolling. So once we're here, we're ready to gather all our documents. Now, before we start prompting Claude, I need to explain to you how Claude will actually find these documents, because this is really the key on how everything works. Think of it like a game of hide and seek. Documents are hiding in Gmail, Google Drive, maybe your computer. But here's the problem. Claude isn't just allowed to walk into any room he wants. Every room he wants to enter has a lock on it. So let's say your W-2 is sitting there right in your inbox. Claude literally cannot get it because the door is locked. And that's where the concept of connectors come in. A connector is basically a key. So let's say you add a connector for Gmail to Claude. What that means is you're handing Claude the keys to your inbox. And when you add one for Google Drive, you're handing him the key to your Google Drive. Now he can actually go into these rooms, find what's hiding and bring it all back and gather them. So let's start adding them. Okay, so let's give Claude access to these connectors. And to do that, what we're going to do is we're going to come here and hit this plus button and then scroll down to where it says connectors and hit manage connectors. Great. Now what we do is we need to add a new connector. So we're going to hit this plus button right here and then we're going to browse connectors. Luckily, there's already a Gmail So let's connect that, and it's going to open up a little tab like this. So I'm going to hit continue and log into the account I need. Great. Now you can see if I go back to connectors, if I go to Gmail, I can hit on. Let me turn all of this stuff off so you can understand what's going to happen. Right now, let's go back to manage connectors and add Google Drive. Browse Connectors, and then Drive. Let's search for it here, and then hit Drive, connect it, connect our account. Great. So now if I hit plus, if I go back to Connectors, now I can turn on Google Drive. And now to let it search your computer, what you want to do is you want to go down here, you want to hit this button, and then hit Choose a Different Folder. And depending on where your stuff is, you can give it access to your entire computer if you hit this thing on Mac, And then hit open. So it's going to search through your entire computer and I'm going to let it always allow. And this is just a small segue. If you do have, let's say, your documents in other random applications where Claude doesn't have a connector, most likely if you go to zapier.com/MCP and do start building, you can connect the Zapier connector and the Zapier connector has access to over 8,000 tools where Claude has access to like, I don't know, like 40 or something like that. And let's say QuickBooks is an example. You can connect it to QuickBooks Online, and you know, that's very common to use for taxes. Add all these in. Let's say you hit connect, and then if you do connect and take this, if you scroll down and you take this, and then you go back to Claude, then you hit connectors, connectors, manage connectors, add custom connector. If you enter it here and then call it Zapier, I don't know, connector. And this is a small hack where you can really take advantage of connectors to connect Claude to any application. So great. Now we just gave Claude access to our Google Drive, our files in our computer, and our Gmail. So now let's gather all the documents that we need. Now that we've connected all the connectors, what we're going to do is just be speaking to Claude so we can gather all the documents and make sure we have a good workspace. So I'm going to just speak to Cloud, all you need to do is just understand the framework. I'm trying to do my taxes for this year. I have my documents squared away in my Google Drive, my email, and my computer. You should have access to all of it. I want you to go make a new folder right now. And in that new folder, please make a copy and dump in all those necessary documents for taxes and go through all the documents. And if you have other questions that you need to understand from me, make a questionnaire that I'm going to be talking to you and telling you all about. Okay. So what I'm looking for is for you to gather all the documents that's scattered across all my desktop and my Gmail and for everything. By the way, my name is Alex. So only use the documents related to Alex, the marketing coordinator, and let's start doing my taxes after that. Right. Okay. So that's about it. I just word vomited everything and I just said, let's go. So now it's going to be working on it in the background because I already gave it access to like Google Drive, Gmail, all this stuff and my computer. It should be able to find everything, compile everything, and I'll come back after it's done. Okay, so it just got done and did a lot of bunch of work. You can see there's a bunch of progress where it's finding all this stuff. So let me open up this folder right here and I see it has gathered all my documents. So you could see this is the W-2 for Alex. Yep, all the stuff, Alex Johnson. This is the W-3 form. There's a bunch of forms that I don't need to understand what they are, etc. Okay, so let me download this folder by hitting right here and then hit download. All right, awesome. So I see we have all of Alex's documents that he needs to do his tax return. I don't personally need to understand all of this, but it seems like most of it's there. And if something's not there, I'm going to get Claude to ask me. So let's say most of the stuff is gathered. Now let's move on to the next step, which is processing all these docs. Now to process all these docs, what we need to do is actually think like an accountant. So the next step is now that we've learned how to use Claude to gather everything, now we're going to see how we can get Claude to process all these documents it's found. Okay, so now all we're going to do again is just speak to Claude. But just to keep everything organized, this is the tab where we have gathered all our information, right? So what we want to do is just to keep everything clear, let's open up a new task. And the reason we're doing that is because now we're going to select the folder where we basically had Alex and all his stuff. So for example, I'm going to select Alex Search Doc and put this on. So now, okay, so I just found all these documents. If you need anything from me, you can ask. But what I want you to do is Now we want to make all the information for a Form 1040 because I want to be filing my tax returns. I want to make sure everything is in order. And then at the end, can you also tell me what is the expected return I might be getting? Okay, great. That's about it. And I'm going to hit go and then I'm going to wait again. So just to add some clarity, what I did was I closed the scope of Claude so it doesn't have to process everything in my computer and my drive and whatnot. It has the limited context and Claude can be smarter in thinking through all of those. It can process those and it'll probably give me way, way, way better output than if I just continued on in that thread. All right. So this got done. I'm just looking at it and okay, this is kind of cool. It did all the line items for Alex. It's saying the refund is going to be around this much. And here is my 1040. So if I click it, oh, you see it processed my last tax refund and it's talking about how that happened. It's talking about all the property tax, the charitable donations, the income, etc. So that's pretty cool. And we can see it processed all these files to make this. Okay, now let's say I don't know what's going on. Let me ask it for what's the next steps. All right. So now that we made this, I need to file my tax returns. What are the next steps that I should be doing to file them? Great. So now that's how I'm really taking it. When you use AI, you need to ask AI what you don't know or what the next steps even can be. So that's the way we just move forward step by step. And now let's see. It's talking about this stuff. You have a few options. Tax software like TurboTax, FreeTaxUSA will walk you through everything and e-file everything for you. They'll also generate all this stuff. Okay, great. So now we have all the references and all the docs inside this chat. So what we're going to do now is I'm going to show you how we can get Claude to actually do the next steps, which is actually sending this to the IRS. Okay, so for the last step, send, what we're going to do is make sure we have our automations and make sure that Claude can control our computer. And how we're going to do that is because Claude already has the access of all our receipts, right? So after we set up the automation, Claude will be able to use our browser and then fill in all the data, which means at the end we can just do a final human review. It can be you, it can be an accountant, and it's probably going to cost significantly less if you want to to happen that way, and then you can ship it off and do your taxes really fast. All right. So let me show you how to do that. Okay. So to do this part, what we're going to need is we're going to need this Claude Desktop Chrome extension. And the way we get that is let me type in Claude Desktop Chrome extension. And I'm also going to have this in the link below for you guys. So let me go here. Let's hit Add to Chrome and then let's hit Add Extension. Great. And then it's just going to ask me to log in and I'm going to log in. And then you're going to hit Authorize. And then what you do is you hit I Understand, and then you hit Next, and then you hit Next, and let's go. Great. So now you'll see you'll have this Claude tab open and all of this stuff. Okay, right here. And I'm going to switch it to act without asking. So now this is kind of cool. So now if I go back to my Claude right here, what we're going to do is we're going to use the concept of connectors again. So right here, connectors, you're going to see this thing, Claude in Chrome, and then you're going to turn that on. All right. So now I'll just show you a quick example and then we'll move on to the next step. Hey, can you open up FreeTaxUSA site? And see, it is going to ask you for permission. And I'm going to say allow for all browser actions. And you see right here, it got loaded. And it's navigating right here. Okay. So right here, what you want to do is you want to go here and then log in. And right here, after you log in, you can just hit your continue your tax returns. And for example, let's say you don't know what this is or what these are. Now you'll have Claude to be like, hey, can you help me and fill these in? Uh, in the free tax, you should have access to all my docs. Can you paste them and then move on? And fill in what's on the screen right now. And right here you see it already says I can see the W-2 entry page. I'll enter all this stuff. Let me click continue, etc. So this is kind of— think about it like a helper that's going to help you go across everything. Don't just rely on it willy-nilly. Please do your own research, verify it, and don't just go all the way through. Maybe make it verified by someone you know. Or make sure you also do a final check through. But this is just a massive help that can help you get started. And if you get confused in some places, you have a friend that's already helping you out. So yeah, all these details are random and it's made up. So I'm not going to submit a form right now because Alex is made up. But this is essentially the way you can have AI fill in all this random forms and whatnot. and you don't have to do much. Okay. And you can see right now it's actually filling in the form with all the data rather than you having to find the stuff on your own. It's going to be autonomously working because it has access to your desktop. It has access to all your files and it has access to your Chrome so it can fill this stuff in. And this stuff will automatically speed people up so much because normally it's confusing and hard to do. But this kind of puts you ahead in the right direction. But make sure you please, please, please verify all this information and don't let Claude willy-nilly do everything. All right. This is just the first step. So you can just be a lot faster in what you do in your day to day. You know, this is really cool, the fact that Claude has access to your life and it can do all this tedious work for you. But if you want to take it to the next step, watch this video right here where I show you some crazy practical use cases that I've been using it for.