Contractor payments for US businesses

A named person on our team owns your file and reviews everything that leaves it. Software does a real share of the grinding underneath it — coding, matching, flagging the obvious gaps — but nothing regulated happens without a person’s judgement, and nothing here is signed or filed by an algorithm.

No — contractor payments is operational work inside your books, not something submitted to IRS. Where a filing does sit downstream of it, inside payroll operations more broadly, that stays with your CPA or enrolled agent, never with us.

Whatever you already run. Most commonly QuickBooks, Xero, NetSuite, Sage, Zoho Books and a handful of others — we work inside your system rather than moving you onto one of our own.

A short, free read-only look at what you already have, and a written note on what we found. A scoping call decides the size of the engagement — nothing here commits you to anything.

There is no published price for contractor payments — it depends on volume, how many entities are involved, and how far behind the books are. We quote after the read-only review, which is free.

Contractor payments sits inside payroll operations, alongside Payroll processing, Form 941 support, W-2 and 1099-NEC support. Most clients end up buying the category as a whole rather than one leaf at a time, but starting narrow is fine.

Before the first payment goes out — not after. Collecting it at onboarding means you have the legal name, entity type, and TIN on file from day one, instead of chasing someone down in January who may no longer answer emails from your business.

No. It's cumulative across the calendar year, per contractor, regardless of how many separate invoices or projects the payments came from. A contractor paid $400 on one project and $300 on another has crossed $600 and needs a 1099-NEC.

You're required to begin backup withholding on future payments to that contractor until the TIN issue is resolved. This is a compliance step your CPA should confirm and apply — we flag the missing TIN the moment a W-9 comes back incomplete so it doesn't surface as a surprise later.

Possibly, depending on how the payment was made and reported by the platform. Payments made through certain third-party networks may be reported by the platform itself rather than by you directly — this is a nuance your CPA should confirm per contractor and per platform. Either way, we recommend routing contractor payments through one trackable channel so the question never depends on memory.

No — that determination sits with your CPA or employment counsel, who apply the IRS common-law factors and any state-level tests. What we do is track the payments to whoever you've classified as a contractor, and flag payment patterns worth raising with them.

It happens, but it's the exact scenario ongoing tracking is meant to prevent. With onboarding-stage collection, every active contractor has a W-9 on file well before January — so the pre-filing checklist is a review, not a scramble.

Generally no — foreign contractors performing work outside the US are typically outside 1099-NEC reporting and may fall under different forms and withholding rules entirely. This is a determination for your CPA. We flag foreign-contractor records separately at onboarding so they route to the right conversation instead of being lumped in with domestic 1099-NEC tracking.

Every payment is logged against the contractor's record as it clears the bank, tagged with date, amount, and method, and reconciled on a set cadence rather than reconstructed at year-end. The running per-contractor total against the $600 threshold is always current, not estimated.

The W-9 is the source of truth, not the invoice header. We record the legal name and TIN from the signed W-9 and use that for the ledger and any eventual 1099-NEC — invoice branding or a DBA name doesn't override it.

No — filing sits with your CPA or a Reporting Agent authorized under Form 8655. What we hand off before January 31 is a clean, reconciled contractor ledger with W-9 status and threshold flags already resolved, so filing is a formality rather than a data-collection project.