Pay people to help your business and the IRS wants a short form about it. Here’s what a W-9 and a 1099 actually are, who needs one, and how filing works from the app.
If you pay a person or a small business to do work for you (a designer, a bookkeeper, an editor, a subcontractor), the IRS may want a short form about it called a 1099-NEC. It simply says who you paid and how much. The Contractors page keeps everything for that in one place: the people you pay, their details, and the filing itself.
Their pay is already a business expense in your books, so it counts in your tax estimate like any other cost. The 1099 is a separate reporting step, and the page watches your payments for you: anyone you’ve paid enough to need one shows up under Suggested from payments, ready to add in one click. One thing the page can’t decide is whether someone is a contractor or an employee. If you’re not sure, ask a tax professional before any forms go out.
A W-9 is the form where a contractor gives you their official details: legal name, address, and taxpayer identification number, or TIN (their Social Security number or its business equivalent). You need those details to file their 1099, and the easiest time to ask is when you first hire them, not in January.
Add the contractor with an email address and choose Request W-9. They get a secure form to fill out and sign themselves, and their details land back on your roster when they finish. If you already have their W-9 on paper, you can enter the details yourself instead. Either way their TIN is stored encrypted, and only its last four digits are ever shown again.
You file a 1099-NEC for each contractor you paid at or above the year’s threshold: $600 for tax years through 2025, $2,000 for payments made in 2026 onward. Pick a tax year on the page and it applies the right threshold, totals what you paid each vendor, and flags anyone who still needs a W-9. Copies go to the IRS and to the contractor by January 31.
Corporations are usually exempt, with one classic exception: lawyers. The page hints when a vendor’s name looks corporate, but their W-9 is what confirms it, so you make the final call with Mark exempt.
If you paid a contractor by credit card or through a payment app, those payments are left out of your 1099 totals on purpose. The card company or payment app is required to report them on its own form, a 1099-K, so that income is already covered.
That’s a good thing: if you filed a 1099-NEC for the same payments, the contractor’s income would be reported to the IRS twice. Your totals here only count money paid straight from your bank accounts.
A 1099 only goes through if the name and TIN on it match IRS records, so the app lets you check before you file. Verify TIN runs that check and marks the contractor matched or mismatched. A mismatch blocks filing until you fix it, and a contractor whose TIN you typed in yourself (with no signed W-9 behind it) needs a successful check before their form can go out.
You get five checks a month, and they’re unlimited during filing season, December 1 to February 15.
When the numbers look right, choose E-file 1099-NEC. Before anything is sent, the app shows exactly what will happen: how many forms are eligible, which ones will be skipped and why, and the cost, $4.99 per form, added to your next invoice. Forms the IRS rejects aren’t charged. You confirm a short disclaimer, verify it’s you, and the forms go to the IRS through our e-file partner. You can also have a printed copy mailed to each contractor, or give them secure online access to their copy.
Each form’s result shows on your roster, and you get an email when the IRS accepts or rejects. E-filing is rolling out gradually, so if the button isn’t on your account yet you can still download the list of everyone you paid and file another way.
These are real filings. Once the IRS accepts a form it can’t be unfiled, only corrected. File when the amounts and details are right, not as a test.