How to Use Muin Tax Ready, Step by Step
Connect your books, answer the year's tax questions, work through the readiness checklist and hand your preparer one package. What each step does, what is free, and what Muin never does.
Muin organizes your records. It is not tax advice and does not compute tax, fill in or file a return. Review everything with a tax professional or your filing software before you file.
The free readiness score is available today. Every Tax Ready step, paid steps included, runs today in the Muin platform: start a 30-day trial on a Platform Plan. The paid Tax Ready plan sold on its own comes later; leave your email with Notify me on the Muin Tax Ready page to hear when it opens.
Muin Tax Ready gets your books ready for tax season and hands your preparer one package. It reads the tax year in your books, shows each step still open with a link to the page where you fix it, and builds the package your preparer or filing software works from.
This guide walks through it from setup to the package.
What is free and what is paid
| Part | Free | Paid |
|---|---|---|
| Readiness score: the checklist for the year | Yes | Yes |
| Savings and Risks totals | Yes | Yes |
| Each Savings and Risks item with its records | No | Yes |
| The year’s inputs in Tax Year Details | No | Yes |
| The tax package download | No | Yes |
On a Platform Plan, every step works. If you use Tax Ready on its own free tier, a paid step shows a card that says the paid plan is not on sale yet, instead of an error. Your readiness score keeps working.
Step 1: Open Muin Tax Ready
Open Products in the menu, then Muin Tax Ready. This is its product page: the setup checklist, Run setup and the Tax Ready panel.
Step 2: Run setup
Select Run setup. Setup has three steps:
- Connect your books. Connect QuickBooks under Connectors. If your books are in QuickBooks and no bank is connected to Muin, Tax Season Prep reads your QuickBooks company.
- Answer the year’s tax questions. These are saved in Tax Year Details.
- Turn on the Tax Savings and Risk Watcher. It checks the year on the first of each month and adds anything new to your agent inbox.
When setup is done, your first readiness score shows on the product page.
Step 3: Read the Tax Ready panel
The panel shows where your tax prep stands for the year in five tiles:
- Readiness: the share of the prep steps that are done.
- Open items: everything left across the prep steps.
- Flagged transactions: transactions that need a receipt, look personal or may be an asset.
- 1099 vendors without a W-9: vendors paid over the 1099 threshold with no W-9 on file.
- Tax package: ready to download, or how many prep steps are left.
Select a tile to open the page behind it. The 1099 tile opens Finance > Tax & Compliance > 1099 & W-9, filtered to vendors missing a W-9. The others open Tax Season Prep for that year.
Step 4: Work through the checklist
Go to Finance > Tax & Compliance > Tax Season Prep and pick the tax year. Each step says how many items are left and links to the page where you fix them: missing bank months, uncategorized transactions, receipts, personal spending, large purchases, tax lines, tax forms you received and contractor W-9s.
Your filing profile decides which steps appear: Schedule C, Form 1120-S, 1065, 1120 or 990. A nonprofit that files Form 990 also gets steps for splitting expenses by purpose, large donor records for Schedule B and restricted gifts.
Step 5: Fill in Tax Year Details
Go to Finance > Tax & Compliance > Tax Year Details to enter what your books do not hold: your home office square footage, your business miles (Muin totals them from your expense reports) and the tax forms you received, such as 1099-K forms and last year’s return. This is a paid step.
Step 6: Check Savings and Risks
Go to Finance > Tax & Compliance > Savings and Risks to see deductions your books suggest you may be missing, penalties to avoid and the preparer time left. The totals are free. With the paid plan, each item shows the records it comes from.
Step 7: Download the tax package
On Tax Season Prep, select Download tax package. You get a ZIP file with your tax lines as a CSV and a PDF, a TurboTax summary for businesses, expenses that still need a receipt, large purchases to review, assets placed in service, contractors who may need a 1099, your tax-year details and a MANIFEST file. This is a paid step.
Ask Muin
Ask “Am I ready for tax season?” in Ask Muin to get the open steps in chat, or “What could I save on taxes?” for the Savings and Risks items.
Questions people ask
Does Muin file my return? No. Muin does not compute your tax, fill in or file a return. Your preparer decides what applies to you.
Who on my team can see it? Owners and admins see all of it. Other team members need Finance access in their role.
How do I cancel? Open Products > Muin Tax Ready and click Stop renewing. Your books and the free readiness score stay.
The full help page is Tax Season Prep. Every answer on Muin Tax Ready is in Muin Tax Ready questions.
Related Reading
- Get your books ready for tax season, even if you didn’t keep them all year: catching up a year of books before tax season