Finding specific things

The tax-season file hunt, done once

Updated 2026-08-08 · 5 min read

Tax season is a search problem with a deadline. The documents exist — spread over twelve months of downloads, emails and scans — and the cost of missing one is real. Here is a sweep that terminates.

Sweep 1: by name

The easy candidates carry their nature in the filename. Search, one term at a time: invoice, receipt, statement, payslip, W-2, 1099, P60, or your country's equivalents. A Finder Smart Folder with Kind is PDF and a created-date range covering the tax year keeps each pass short.

Sweep 2: by date

Everything financial from the year, regardless of name:

mdfind 'kMDItemContentTypeTree == "com.adobe.pdf" && kMDItemFSCreationDate >= $time.iso(2026-01-01) && kMDItemFSCreationDate < $time.iso(2027-01-01)'

That lists every PDF created in 2026 that Spotlight knows about. It is a long list, but scanning filenames for ten minutes beats reconstructing a forgotten deduction.

Sweep 3: by content

Scans named by the scanner need content search: an accountant's name, a bank's name, an amount. Finder's search set to Contents does this for PDFs with text layers. For image-only scans, OCR first — this is the single most common reason a document that exists cannot be found.

Sweep 4: the excluded places

Mail attachments cached under ~/Library/Mail and Messages media under ~/Library/Messages never appear in Finder searches. Search within Mail itself for the year's statements, or use a tool that indexes the entire disk including ~/Library — that closes the gap where "I know it was emailed to me" goes to die.

File as you find

Make ~/Documents/Tax/2026 and move every hit into it as it surfaces. The sweep becomes an archive, next year's version of you starts from a folder instead of a search box, and your accountant gets one zip instead of eleven emails.

Common questions

How do I find bank statements I downloaded months ago?

Search Downloads by content for the bank's name, restricted to PDFs and the tax year's date range — statements rarely have helpful filenames.

What about documents that only arrived by email?

Search inside Mail directly, or use a whole-disk indexed search tool; Finder and Spotlight skip Mail's attachment cache entirely.