“The 1099 Manager has greatly streamlined the 1099 process by allowing the end user to be self-sufficient in managing their vendor data with W9 data updating in real time.”
– Matthew Rector (Director of Quality Assurance)
1099, a four “letter” word that puts a damper on the new year for every accountant and small business owner. I know your pain. As an accountant turned Product Manager, I have felt the pain myself, so it was an easy decision to prioritize the management of 1099s as a product priority this past year for our team. Now here we are a few weeks away from the filing deadline, and our accounting team and customers have smiles on their faces as we enter into tax season thanks to our new 1099 management tool. Below are just a few of the pain points we helped alleviate with this new tool as we kicked off the New Year, so our financial consultants could focus on driving high value engagement with our clients instead of focusing their time on 1099s.
Pain Point #1: Collecting all of the W9 information from your clients
What used to be a manual, burdensome task to collect W9 information from our clients is now a smooth, streamlined process for our accounting team, and our clients. No more emails back and forth to customers to gather and approve everything. Our solution facilitates easy collaboration with our customers directly through our Ceterus Web interface, Edge Web. Our customers are notified when they need to take action, and our entire team sees status updates in real time- it’s that simple.
Pain Point #2: Organizing and reviewing your client’s contractors and payments so filings will be correct
You may already be familiar with the Quickbooks (QBO) feature where you can set up your 1099 accounts and flag vendors for eligibility. Our 1099 manager works very similar- except the biggest difference is our accountants can view this information across all of our customers at once. They don’t have to go in and out of multiple QBO files to get everything ready for 1099s. It’s all in one place, ready for our accountants to review after they simply confirm the accounts and vendors that are eligible for 1099s for each customer (if they even changed from prior year). So at the end of the year, they are presented with an organized summary of who we will be filing 1099s for- it’s that simple.
Pain Point #3: E-Filing your 1099s
After reviewing all of the information for our customers, it’s time to file. Our accountants don’t have to go in and out of multiple QBO files to e-file. Instead, they see a 1099 summary of everything that will be filed, and can quickly export and import that detail into a 1099 e-file account of our choosing, such as Track1099- it’s that simple.
Let me walk you through an example to show you the power of our product:
Our customer Bob has 5 different legal entities, each of which paid 10 contractors in 2020- that is 50 different 1099s that need to be filed…. wow. In our 1099 manager, we have already identified the accounts and vendors that are 1099 eligible, and we already have W9 information from last year for 30 of those vendors. So as soon as we see Bob pay a new contractor (even if this happens on January 1), we send a message to Bob through the Ceterus Web interface, Edge Web, for him to immediately update the W9 information for that new vendor.
Bob is alerted through his mobile device too to fill this information in- and he can even upload a W9 directly into Edge Web as opposed to filling out our internal form. Bob can also see a full summary of all of his 1099 filings for the year. Bob has a big smile on his face knowing how easy and secure it is to share this information, compared to the numerous email exchanges that took place in the prior year. His changes come to our internal Ceterus CPA platform in real time, where our accountants can easily review the status of all of our outstanding contractors, for all of our customers, in one 1099 manager view.
If you’re an accountant at a CPA firm wanting to improve the 1099 process for your team, you need this tool. As part of our Ceterus CPA platform, our 1099 Manager allows you to maximize efficiency, minimize the risk of errors, and avoid 1099 penalties. So instead, you can spend more time engaging with your clients on more important matters. By choosing Ceterus as the foundation for your firm’s process for effectively and efficiently delivering monthly financial statements, you can improve not only your firm’s 1099 process with our CPA platform, but so much more.
And here at Ceterus, our product team will continue to focus on automating and improving those manual, mundane tasks for you. After all, most of our team is made up of accountants that have transitioned into product. So let our 1099 Manager, built by accountants for accountants, be a part of your 2021 New Year’s Resolutions.
“The biggest value is knowing customers can find all parts of the 1099 Process in one single place [in Edge Web], better yet, the place where customers are already going to review financials.”
– Stephanie Rosenberry (Customer Success Operations Manager)
