You can do it yourself, by hand would be a pain in the ass if you don’t know what you’re doing. If you do know what you’re doing, its gonna take maybe 1/2 hour for a few 1099’s. I just looked for low cost services online and Intuit will prepare all the forms for you for $39, $25 if done before Jan 23.[/quote]
Presumably, if you’re a business owner, you have a piece of computer software that tracks all your expenses, because $600 paid out to a handyman is $600 that you can deduct from your net income, and that lowers your tax bill, potentially by up to $200. So it’s a simple matter of adding a new feature to that software, to make it print a stack of 1099’s when you do a tax return.[/quote]
That’s all well and good for a business, even a small business. But this post was in reference to someone who owns a rental home. Maybe they use quicken or something like that to track their expenses, and even if they don’t, usually figuring out who you paid $600 to isn’t all that difficult.
But actually getting the damn things printed? Quicken doesn’t do it. (Quickbooks does, I think, but if you own a single rental house, QB is overkill and not worth the money.) Eh, not quite as easy as clicking on print. I have software that costs a couple hundred bucks. (does a whole bunch of other shit too.) Carries all the info over from one year to the next. Takes me 10 minutes to do about 10 of them. Someone who has never done it? 30 minutes. Easiest way, pay $40 to a service to do it for you. Or do it early and it’s only $25.
(And you can’t wait until you do your tax return. 1099’s are due to recipients by 1/31, to the IRS by 2/28)
