The AI file organizer for accountants. Automate the receipt and 1099 pile.
Sortio reads receipts, invoices, bank statements, 1099s, W-2s, and K-1s on your Mac (or PC), routes each into the right client folder by tax year, and renames PDFs from their contents. Built for solo CPAs, bookkeeping shops, and tax preparers staring down a March pile that doubles every week.
How tax-season filing works
Four steps from a downloads folder of unidentified PDFs to clean per-client tax-year folders.
Point at the pile
Drop a folder of receipts, scanned 1099s, downloaded brokerage statements, and emailed invoices into Sortio. It also watches your Downloads folder so new arrivals get processed automatically.
Read content, not filenames
Sortio reads each PDF, screenshot, or image and extracts vendor, date, amount, document type (receipt, invoice, 1099-NEC, K-1, W-2, bank statement), and the client or entity name. scan_047.pdf becomes 2026-03-14_Vendor_$142.83.pdf with the right metadata attached.
Route by client and tax year
Each file lands in the matching client folder (Smith / 2026 / 1099s for example). Sortio recognizes business entities, sole proprietors, and 1040 individuals as separate roots and routes accordingly. You preview every assignment before files move.
Lock the year, archive cleanly
At year end the Rule Builder packs each client folder into a read-only archive named with the filing date. Working folders empty out for the new year, the audit log captures every move, and a partner can hand off a closed client folder to storage without manual review.
The accounting filing problem
Six patterns we hear from every CPA, EA, and bookkeeping shop we talk to. Every one of them gets worse the closer you get to a filing deadline.
The March pile doubles weekly
February: 12 client folders, mostly organized. March: every client emails or uploads a fresh stack of receipts and 1099s every week. By mid-March your downloads folder has 1,400 unfiled PDFs and you cannot tell which client a scan_047.pdf belongs to without opening it.
Receipts named DSC_0001 and IMG_4582
Clients photograph receipts on their phones and AirDrop them over, or scan a stack with a Fujitsu and dump the output into a folder. None of those names tell you the vendor, amount, or date. Manual rename is 15 seconds per file; on 800 receipts that is over three hours per client.
1099-NEC, 1099-INT, K-1, W-2 all in one folder
A client sends a zip with twelve 1099 forms, three K-1s from partnerships, and a stack of brokerage 1099-DIVs. They are all named "1099.pdf" or "Form-1099.pdf" with a number on the end. Sorting them by issuer and account takes longer than entering them.
Receipts misfiled to the wrong client
You file an Uber receipt under client A. It actually belongs to client B (different business). At quarter close you reconcile and find the discrepancy. Now you are scrubbing back through a month of receipts to find anything else that may have ended up in the wrong place.
Year-end archive prep is a manual slog
When you close out 2025 work, you want to lock 2025 working files and start 2026 fresh. In practice that is hours of dragging folders, renaming archives, and verifying nothing got left behind. The Downloads folder of last-minute statements gets archived as one undifferentiated lump.
Multi-year amendments need yesterday's structure
A client gets a CP2000 notice for 2023. You need that year's clean folder, with the brokerage statements, K-1s, and receipts in their original layout. If the 2023 archive is messy you spend an hour reconstructing what the file pile looked like before you can answer the IRS letter.
The filing patterns CPAs actually need
Sortio recognizes the document categories that show up inside a tax or bookkeeping engagement and routes each one.
Receipts and expense docs
Coffee shop receipts, ride-share PDFs, Amazon orders, gas station printouts. Sortio reads each one for vendor, date, and amount, renames to 2026-04-12_Vendor_$142.83.pdf, and files under the right client and expense category. See our full pattern for naming PDFs by content.
Read the PDF rename guideInvoices in and out
Vendor bills your client receives, and invoices your client sends to their own customers. Sortio recognizes both directions and files them under accounts payable or accounts receivable inside the client folder, tagged by month so reconciliation is one Finder filter away.
Bank and brokerage statements
Monthly statements arrive as Chase_Statement_Apr2026.pdf or Fidelity_1099-DIV.pdf or, worse, just statement.pdf. Sortio extracts the institution, account number tail, and statement period, then files by client, account, and year. Year-end downloads from a brokerage land in the right tax year folder automatically.
1099s, W-2s, K-1s
Sortio recognizes the form type (1099-NEC, 1099-MISC, 1099-INT, 1099-DIV, 1099-B, W-2, K-1, 1095-A) and the issuing entity. A folder of 30 "1099.pdf" files becomes 30 cleanly named forms organized by client, then by form type. The 1099-NEC pile from one client gets sub-grouped by payer.
Entity-level vs personal returns
Many of your clients have two parallel returns: an S-corp or partnership return, and their personal 1040. Sortio keeps the entity folder and the personal folder separate by entity ID and Social, so a vehicle expense receipt does not accidentally land in the personal return folder.
Payroll and quarterly filings
For your bookkeeping clients running payroll, Sortio routes 941 and state quarterly filings into a payroll subfolder by quarter, and pulls year-end W-3 transmittals into the year-end binder folder. Payroll provider exports (Gusto, ADP, Paychex) are detected by their PDF templates.
Close 2025, start 2026 in fifteen minutes
When you finish a client's return, the Rule Builder packs that tax year into a clean read-only archive: receipts split by month, 1099s grouped by issuer, brokerage statements ordered by date, payroll filings by quarter, and the working drafts moved into a "superseded" subfolder. The new year starts with an empty working tree and every prior year is reproducible.
IRS retention is three to seven years depending on the situation. Sortio tags each year's archive with a retention class so when you re-open it for an amendment or a CP2000 notice, you find the exact layout you had at filing time. Nothing has been renamed or reshuffled after the fact.
Reproducible archives
A closed year archive is locked, named with filing date and form type, and the audit log captures every file movement that produced it. Three years later you can still answer the IRS.
Local-first for sensitive data
Receipts and statements with bank account numbers and Social Security info never leave your machine. Run Sortio with a local LLM (Ollama) and even filenames stay on-device.
Audit log per move
Every file Sortio renames or routes is logged with timestamp, source path, and destination. If a partner asks "where did this expense come from", you can answer in under a minute.
Multi-year reproducibility
Open a 2023 archive and the layout is the layout you had on April 14th 2024. Amendments and IRS notices land on a familiar tree, not a reshuffled mess.
Simple pricing
Most solo CPAs and EAs start with Pro. Bookkeeping shops with multiple preparers graduate to Team for a shared rule library across the client base.
Accountant FAQ
Questions from solo CPAs, EAs, bookkeeping shops, and tax preparers evaluating Sortio for client folder discipline and tax-season throughput.
It reads each PDF, image, or scanned document on your Mac, extracts the vendor, date, amount, document type, and which client or entity it belongs to, then routes it into the correct client folder by tax year and renames it consistently. Sortio is local-first: file content is read on your machine and you can run inference against the default classifier, your own API key (BYOK), or a fully local LLM like Ollama. Most CPAs install it during tax season and never go back.
The standard pattern: watch the Downloads folder and a shared per-client intake folder. New PDFs and images are read, named from content (vendor, date, amount), and routed under Client / Tax Year / Document Type. A 1099-NEC for client Acme from payer XYZ lands at Acme/2026/1099s/XYZ_1099-NEC_2026.pdf without you touching it. A coffee receipt scanned by the client lands in Acme/2026/Receipts/2026-03-14_StarbucksReserve_$8.45.pdf.
Receipts are recognized as a document type and renamed using the pattern date_vendor_amount.pdf. A receipt photographed in the Apple Wallet of a small business owner and sent over AirDrop turns into 2026-03-14_OfficeDepot_$54.12.pdf. For a deep-dive on the technique (and the prompt template behind it), see our automatically rename PDFs by content guide, which uses the same engine.
Yes. Sortio recognizes each tax form by its layout and content (form number, issuing entity, recipient name, tax year) and routes them into separate subfolders. A client zip with twelve 1099s, three K-1s, and two W-2s gets unpacked into Client/2026/1099s/, Client/2026/K-1s/, Client/2026/W-2s/ in one pass. The Rule Builder can refine the structure further (for example splitting 1099-DIV from 1099-INT inside the 1099s folder).
Not unless you pick the cloud classifier. In Ollama mode no file content (and no filenames) crosses the network. In BYOK mode requests go from your Mac directly to your provider on your account, never through Sortio. With the default Sortio classifier, filenames and extracted entities cross the wire but are redacted from server-side logs after 30 days. For CPAs handling SSNs and account numbers, we recommend Ollama or BYOK.
Not directly today. What it does instead: work on any folder your tax software can read or export to. Most modern stacks (UltraTax, Drake, ProSeries, Lacerte, QuickBooks Online exports) write to or read from a local folder, and Sortio organizes that folder. The Buildium and Rent Manager integrations are shipping in the same wave for the property managers who use them, but generic accounting integration is filesystem-only for now.
Sortio adapts to whatever you already have. Most accountants land on Clients/<Last Name First Name>/<Tax Year>/<Document Type>, or for entity work Clients/<Entity Name>/<Year>/<Document Type>. Tell Sortio your structure once via the Rule Builder, turn on "Restrict to a folder list", and it routes new arrivals into matching folders only (with a fallback bucket for unknown clients).
The Rule Builder packs each closed year into a read-only archive named with the filing date. Working drafts move to a superseded subfolder, the receipts and statements get split by month for clean reconciliation, and the audit log captures every move so you can reproduce the year three or five years later if an IRS notice arrives.
AI Sort runs up to 5,000 files per pass on Pro and a 2,000-receipt pile typically completes in a few minutes on a modern Mac. For multi-year archives (10,000 plus files), use the Rule Builder. Rule sorts process unlimited files instantly at no AI credit cost. The pattern we recommend for new users: AI Sort the most recent month's pile to teach Sortio your conventions, then build a rule from that and run the rule over the year's backlog.
Yes, and many do. The Free tier lets a client photograph receipts all month, dump them into a single folder, and run a one-click Sortio sort before sending you the clean per-month receipt folder. Cuts your March intake time and lets you start work with named, dated files instead of a heap of IMG_4582.JPG.
Yes. Each entity is a separate root folder. The Rule Builder lets you say "if a file mentions Acme Holdings LLC, file under the entity; if it mentions John Smith personally and is not vehicle-related to the LLC, file under the 1040 folder." Mixed entity returns stay separate, and you can audit the routing decision per file.
Free tier gives you 50 AI credits and up to 50 files per sort, enough to try one client folder before paying. Pro is $14.99 per month or $99 per year, including 5,000 AI credits, AI sort up to 5,000 files per run, auto-sort on file change, and BYOK so you can plug in your own provider. Team is $29 per seat per month for shops where multiple preparers share a rule library.
Sortio ships for macOS, Windows, and Linux. Many CPAs run it on a Mac connected to a scanner; bookkeeping shops often run it on Windows next to QuickBooks Desktop. Same product, same Pro pricing.
Download Free, point Sortio at a single client's current tax-year working folder, and run AI Sort. Approve the preview. Once you like the routing, open the Rule Builder and turn the routing into a saved rule. Apply that rule to your other clients. Most accountants reach steady state on their full book within a weekend.
Request a Demo
Tell us about your practice and we will show you Sortio working with a sample of your client folders.