Tax Studio for VS Code

Turn a messy folder of tax documents into a clean, fully-sourced planning estimate and review package — privately, on your own machine.

lynxdi.com/tax  ·  Marketplace

The problem

Every tax season starts the same way: a scramble.

W-2s, 1099s, 1098s, K-1s, brokerage summaries, mortgage statements, donation receipts, bank statements — they trickle in over weeks from a dozen portals, inboxes, and envelopes. Each one lands with a name like document(3).pdf, in no particular order, in no particular folder.

Before anyone can actually file, someone has to grind through the boring, error-prone part by hand:

• figure out what each document is, whose it is, and which tax year it belongs to,
• rename and sort them so they're findable — this year and next,
• read the numbers off every form and re-type them, box by box, into a return,
• then double-check nothing got fat-fingered, and notice what's still missing.

That sorting-reading-retyping grind is where the hours go, and where the costly mistakes creep in. The filing itself is the easy twenty minutes at the end — if the data in front of you is clean, complete, and you actually trust it.

The solution

Drop everything into one folder and let Tax Studio do the tedious 90%.

It reads each document, figures out the type, the taxpayer, and the tax year, files it into a clean year-first library, and pulls out every value that matters. Then it ties each number back to the exact spot on the page it came from — so you can trust it at a glance instead of re-checking it by hand. It even tells you what's still missing compared with last year.

What's left is the part that was never the problem: reviewing a clean, verified summary and filing it — yourself, with your return software, or by handing your CPA a package they can act on immediately.

The core document and calculation pipeline runs on your machine. Network access is limited to actions you explicitly start, such as downloading synthetic samples, using a configured remote receipt-extraction endpoint, or asking your separately subscribed coding agent about the workspace.

  input\  ──▶  classify  ──▶  extract (deterministic-first)  ──▶  library\<year>\<taxpayer>\<category>\
 (inbox)        (doc type,       (values + source anchors)          (renamed, deduped, hash-verified)
                 taxpayer,                    │
                 tax year)                    ▼
                                      SQLite evidence graph  ──▶  Review · Planning estimate · FDX / CPA export

Why it's different

• Hours of sorting collapse to seconds. Documents are classified and filed automatically, taxpayer entities create themselves from the paperwork, and every value you'll need to file is pulled out for you — no manual re-typing.
• Every number is verifiable. Each extracted value carries a source anchor — the document, page, region, and form field it came from. Click a value; the original PDF highlights exactly where it lives. No black-box guesses to second-guess.
• Local-first, private by default. Your documents stay in your folder. The entire pipeline — classification, extraction, the SQLite evidence database, PDF preview — runs offline. No account, no server, no telemetry. The only optional network touchpoint is a consent-gated AI tier that is off by default (and can be pointed at a fully-local model).
• Deterministic-first extraction. Tax Studio reads structured data straight from the PDF before it ever reasons about text. An AI model is the last resort, not the first.
• Your files are never altered. Originals are copied and renamed into the library by the normalizer with a post-move hash re-verify; the original bytes are left untouched.
• Review-ready output. Export FDX (Financial Data Exchange) JSON, a clearly labeled planning-estimate PDF, or a foldered CPA review package. These are review and transfer artifacts—not a filed return, IRS approval, or an e-file transmission.
• Agent-ready. The workspace is self-describing and ships a read-only MCP server, so any coding agent (Claude, etc.) can safely query your tax data — and propose corrections through one scoped, audited write path.

Tax Studio implements the architecture of US provisional patent 64/115,885, "In-Situ, Model-Independent Document Intelligence with Source-Role-Validated Evidence Grounding, Region-Level Selective Invalidation, and Evidence-Bound Deterministic Generation."

How it works

1. Open a folder in VS Code and initialize it — each folder is an independent tax workspace (open a different folder in another window for a different taxpayer).
2. Drop documents into the workspace's input\ inbox (or point Tax Studio at external input folders — originals stay put, copies are filed).
3. Classify & File. Tax Studio detects the document type, the taxpayer, and the tax year, then files it into library\<year>\<taxpayer>\<category>\ with a clean, human-readable name. Taxpayers auto-create from the documents themselves — zero setup.
4. Review extracted values side-by-side with the source PDF; approve, correct, or flag.
5. Export FDX JSON, a planning-estimate PDF, or a CPA review package when you're ready to continue in separate filing software or hand the evidence to a qualified professional.

Features

Ingest & organize

• Zero-setup inbox → library. Documents are classified and filed automatically; taxpayer entities are created from the documents (individuals, Joint, and Business\<Name>\).
• Year-first library — library\<year>\<taxpayer>\<category>\ — with human-readable file names (2025 - 1099-DIV - Example Brokerage - x1234.pdf).
• Returns & planning trees you manage yourself: returns\<year>\<taxpayer>\draft|final\ and planning\<year>\. Filed returns are indexed as prior-year evidence but never renamed.
• Multiple input folders — add external drop zones; originals are kept, copies are filed.
• Exact-duplicate detection, expected-but-missing document checks (vs. the prior year), and year-over-year inventory diffs.
• Two views of the tree: disk-aligned by section, or pivoted by taxpayer — toggle from the title bar.

Deterministic-first extraction pipeline

Tax Studio tries the cheapest, most reliable method first and only escalates when it must. The tier order is fixed:

Bundled form packs cover common forms — W-2, the 1099 family (INT/DIV/B/R/NEC/MISC/OID), 1098/1098-T/1098-E, 5498, 1095-A/B/C, and 1040 / Schedule B — each mapping a form box to a semantic key, an FDX path, and a plain-English description. Need a form that isn't here? Open an issue with the form name — mapping a fillable AcroForm is a data change, not a code change.

Evidence graph with source anchors

Every extracted value becomes an assertion in a local SQLite evidence graph, bound to a source anchor (document · version · page · region · form field). When a source document changes, Tax Studio selectively invalidates only the assertions that depended on the changed region — preserving your human review and corrections everywhere else.

Document Review panel

Open any filed document into a split view: the extracted values on the left — the assembled FDX data, plus a scannable QR of it — beside the original PDF on the right. Click a value to highlight exactly where it came from on the page. Values are editable inline — a correction is saved to the database while the machine's original value is preserved as history, and re-extraction conflict-checks instead of overwriting. Fields a form pack expected but that came back empty are flagged in red.

Intake worksheet

A per-year, schema-driven intake worksheet (filing status, dependents, income, deductions, credits, estimated payments, and more) with a sliding Yes/No toggle and auto-fill from last year's answers — a guided way to make sure nothing is missing before you file.

Analytics & planning

Per-taxpayer / per-year rollups of the extracted evidence (W-2 wages, 1099 income by type, business income vs. expense, donations), a document checklist, duplicates, needs-review counts, and a starter CPA-questions doc. Totals roll straight up from the documents you've filed — a clear, verifiable picture of your year before you file.

Export

• FDX JSON (independently-written, FDX-shaped schemas; targets FDX v6.5.0), per taxpayer and year.
• CPA review package — a foldered handoff of the reviewed data and its provenance.

Model Context Protocol (MCP) — agent access to your tax data

Tax Studio ships a read-only MCP server so a coding agent can query your evidence graph without ever reading the extension's source or touching raw files. Set Up MCP for This Workspace writes an .mcp.json and stages the server; it opens tax.db read-only and answers over stable views. It reads the database through Node's built-in node:sqlite — the native SQLite module is never exposed to the agent surface.

Every tool is read-only except one scoped, audited correction path:

The working folder also generates byte-identical AGENTS.md / CLAUDE.md / GEMINI.md from the live database schema, so any agent can operate on your data read-only without guessing.

Privacy & AI

• No document content ever leaves your machine unless you explicitly turn on the receipt vision tier.
• lynxTax.allowRemoteExtraction is off by default (machine-scoped — a workspace can never enable it). With it on and lynxTax.receipt.vlmEndpoint set, receipt page images go to that OpenAI-compatible endpoint — point it at a model you host (e.g. a GPU box on your LAN) or a cloud provider (LYNXTAX_VLM_API_KEY).
• The vision tier only runs on receipts, and any value it returns must re-anchor to source text or it's confidence-capped and flagged for review.
• Tax Studio runs only in a trusted workspace (it reads your documents, runs a local Python sidecar, and loads a native SQLite module).
• Full trust model — originals-never-altered, working-folder confinement, the read-only agent surface, and interpreter pinning are documented in docs/security.md.

Getting started

1. Install the extension and open the folder you want to use as a tax workspace.
2. Run Tax Studio: Initialize Tax Workspace… (or click Initialize This Folder in the Tax Workspace view). This scaffolds input\, library\, returns\, planning\, exports\, and a hidden .tax\ (the database, derived text, and logs).
3. (Optional) Run Load Sample Documents… to fetch a synthetic Jane/John Doe demo bundle (obviously-fake identities) into input\.
4. Drop your own PDFs / images / CSV / OFX / QFX into input\.
5. Run Classify & File Inbox Documents and open the Dashboard.

Key commands (Command Palette → "Tax Studio")

• Initialize Tax Workspace…, Load Sample Documents…
• Scan Inbox, Classify & File Inbox Documents, Process This Document…
• Open Dashboard, Preview Document, Open Tax Worksheet…
• Approve Extracted Value, Flag for Review, Reclassify Document…, Show Evidence in Source
• Find Duplicate Documents, Compare Tax Years…, Check Expected-but-Missing Documents
• Export FDX JSON…, Export CPA Review Package…
• Set Up MCP for This Workspace, Set Up Extraction Backend (Python), Regenerate Working-Folder Agent Map

Requirements

• VS Code ≥ 1.102, Node ≥ 20 (bundled with VS Code's runtime).
• Python ≥ 3.10 (optional but recommended) for deep PDF inspection, table extraction, and OCR. Run Set Up Extraction Backend (Python) to create a managed virtual environment (installs PyMuPDF); OCR additionally uses a system tesseract binary. Without Python, AcroForm and digital-text extraction still work — you just won't get OCR or table tiers.

Settings

Roadmap

Tax Studio currently turns raw documents into sourced evidence, review artifacts, and a clearly labeled planning estimate. It does not file or transmit a tax return.

• IRS MeF qualification and transmission (future; unavailable today) — official form schemas, business-rule validation, IRS ATS qualification, operational controls, and a separate certificate-holding transmitter are all required before any filing claim. The VS Code extension does not transmit returns.
• Real IRS form packs & year-versioned packs (in progress) — fill/read the official IRS AcroForm PDFs; select the correct pack for each document's tax year so history years use that year's form.
• Transactions & reconciliation — populate the transaction ledger, OFX/CSV import mapping, and receipt ↔ transaction matching.
• More form packs — K-1 and beyond.
• Broader AI tier rollout and near-text (fuzzy) duplicate detection.
• In-situ mode — index documents in place, without copying them into a library.

The disclosed techniques are domain-general (the patent covers legal, insurance, medical, mortgage, education, compliance, and more); tax is the first shipping embodiment.

Important disclaimer

Tax Studio is a document-organization and data-analytics tool provided for informational and educational purposes only. It is not tax, legal, accounting, or financial advice, and it is not a substitute for a qualified professional.

All generated tax results are planning estimates. Tax Studio is not IRS-approved filing software and does not submit, transmit, or file returns.

• Extracted values and totals are derived from your own documents and may contain errors — always review them against your originals before relying on them.
• Nothing in Tax Studio constitutes a recommendation about how to file, what to claim, or what you owe. Consult a licensed tax professional for guidance on your specific situation.
• The software is provided "as is," without warranty of any kind. You are solely responsible for the accuracy, completeness, and lawful use of anything you file or submit to any tax authority.

About

Tax Studio is developed by Lynx DI. See lynxdi.com/tax.

Built on the architecture of US provisional patent 64/115,885. Third-party product and company names are trademarks of their respective owners, used for identification only.

License

Copyright © 2026 Lynx DI. Licensed under the GNU Affero General Public License, version 3 or later (AGPL-3.0-or-later) — see LICENSE.

This is free software: you may use, study, share and modify it. If you run a modified version to provide a service over a network, the AGPL requires you to offer that version's source to its users. Bundled third-party components remain under their own licenses (see NOTICE).