Tax declaration is a complex task, but definitely not a complicated one. With a bit of guidance, and thanks to the existing digital tool to support you, it becomes nothing more than a budget game that you get to play once a year.
I will show you, step by step, how I fill my tax declaration in the hope that you can learn some tips and tricks — and myself too, thanks to your feedbacks.
First, please note that this article is dedicated to Vaud Canton residents. For others, you may still go through it and learn some rules that are also applicable to your Canton.
Second, I will assume you never used VaudTax before, meaning you don’t have a .tax file from the previous year that autocompletes a lot of the data to fill.
Last but not least, I split this post into three parts as it was getting too long.
Step 1: Download VaudTax
Follow this link to download VaudTax.
Choose the software of the past year (current year is anyway not present) as you always declare your taxes for the year preceding the current one. In our case, pick the 2016 version.
I let you follow the setup instructions depending on your Operating System (Mac, Windows, or Linux).
Step 2: Open VaudTax
The first time you open VaudTax, you see the following screen.
Start a tax declaration file by clicking on “New” on the top left of the screen.
Step 3: Personal data
Step 4: Income
Important point: if you get the family allowances from a separate entity than your company, like for instance the Centre Patronal, you have to declare this income source as an additional line in your incomes list.
Step 5: Professional fees
Next steps
In case you’re an employee as I am, these first three steps were relatively easy.
As for the next blogpost, we will go through the sections Wealth, Real Estate, and Debts.
And if I missed some tax savings tips on the screenshots above, please let me know in the comments section below!
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