1099 Best Practices

It's critical to review your financials on a monthly (or quarterly) basis to ensure coding, transactions, and balances are all up to your expectations. Our Accounting team is equipped to confirm or look into any questions or changes you may request. See here for how to review your Profit and Loss or Balance Sheet on a regular basis in the Ceterus Bookkeeping Platform.

As soon as you begin working with a new vendor, a great way to set yourself up for success is to obtain a W9 from that vendor early on. Even if throughout the course of the year the vendor does not end up being 1099 eligible, at least you have the information in case they are. That way, you don't have to reach out to them at the beginning of the year to see if they can provide this.

To keep yourself organized, house W9s you receive from each year in a secure storage platform so you can easily find them when needed. Cloud-software like Google Drive, Dropbox or Microsoft OneDrive are helpful tools to make this easy and organized with folders, labels, and sharing permissions.

To avoid any surprises at the end of the year, keep Ceterus in the loop when you begin working with a new vendor. If this is a vendor that you plan to work with overtime, it's especially important to let us know so we can create automated rules around their transactions, and therefore lower the amount of transactions we reach out to you about for clarity.

1099 Manager updates to the current year data May 1st each year. This means you can begin reviewing and editing current year vendors as they are added to your vendor list as early as mid-spring each year - making the 1099 process less hectic as we approach the January deadline.

1099 Primary Contacts will be able to review this data regularly and make changes to vendors that are in Incomplete status throughout the year. If you prefer a different member of your team be listed as the 1099 Primary Contact, please connect with us.

When Ceterus requires items from you to maintain accuracy with your financials, these will populate on the Home page in your Ceterus Bookkeeping application to close financials. To ensure your 1099 vendors and their amounts are up-to-date, we strongly recommend reviewing your blockers a few times the beginning of each month as we close your books to see if there are any items preventing accurate results. If during January your vendor amounts seem off, it could be due to blockers that were not resolved.

Blockers will only be visible to the designated users for your location(s). If you need to add blocker visibility to a member of your team , please connect with us.

Transactions that need more clarity will be presented as blockers in the Ceterus Bookkeeping application. Each transaction will be added because we need to understand what the transaction was for before coding, however sometimes we will also need the vendor to ensure this is applied when scrubbing the amounts during 1099 season. To ensure everything remains up-to-date, a best practice is to always include the Vendor Name as a part of the transaction before clicking submit.