The list writes itself from the books.
Every payment to a person or an unincorporated business is already in the ledger, so the 1099 worklist is built from it rather than from memory. Each payee is tracked against the reporting threshold for that year, whatever it is that year, and the list shows who is over it, who has a W-9 on file and who is still waiting.
Card and platform payments are excluded: those are reported on a 1099-K by the processor, not by you. A payee you know is exempt can be taken off the list with the reason attached, so the decision is written down rather than remembered.
Collecting the W-9s
One click asks a payee for a W-9, or asks everybody still waiting at once. The payee gets a link to a form that asks only what a W-9 asks, signs it, and is done. The link expires; a reminder goes out if nothing came back; a hard-copy version is there for the payee who wants paper.
When the form comes back, the legal name, the entity type and the address come from the W-9 and nowhere else. A bank descriptor is not a legal name, and we never pretend it is.
What happens to the taxpayer number
The number is encrypted the moment it arrives, with a key that is not kept with the data. After that, only the last four digits are ever shown again, enough for you to confirm the right form came back. Every time a W-9 link is opened or a form is signed is recorded, so how a number arrived has an answer that is not somebody's memory of an email.
Filing
We do not file the forms. The finished list exports as a CSV in the shape a filing service takes, and each payee can be marked with the service it was handed to and that service's reference, so "did anyone actually file this one" has an answer in January.
Questions people ask
- Which payments count towards the threshold?
- Payments by cheque, ACH, wire, Zelle and the like to a person or an unincorporated business for services. Card payments do not; the processor reports those.
- Does a corporation get a 1099?
- Generally not, with exceptions for legal and medical payments. The entity type on the W-9 decides it, which is why the form is collected before the list is final.
- Can I collect W-9s for last year's payees?
- Yes. The list is built from whatever years the books cover, so a cleanup of two years produces two years of worklists.
- Do you file the 1099s?
- No. We make the list and collect the forms; filing stays with you or your accountant.