1099 Year-End Prep & E-File Builder: Stop Scrambling Every January

The problem this kills

Every January, someone in accounting becomes a 1099 machine. They pull a year of vendor payments into a spreadsheet, eyeball which vendors crossed $600, hunt down W-9s for the ones missing a tax ID, manually decide whether a payment counts (was that paid by card? is this vendor a corporation? is it the lawyer, who always gets one?), and then re-key it all into a filing portal under a hard IRS deadline.

It's tense, it's manual, and the mistakes are expensive: a missed reportable vendor, a transposed TIN that bounces back as a B-notice, a 1099 sent to a vendor who was reimbursed by credit card and should never have gotten one. You don't need to live like this, and you don't need to be a developer to fix it.

What you'll build

A simple internal web tool. You import two things: the year's vendor payments CSV and your W-9 / vendor tax data (legal name, TIN, address, the 1099 box). The tool dedupes vendors by tax ID, totals each vendor's qualifying payments, applies the right reporting threshold and box, drops the payments that don't count (anything paid by card is reported by the processor, not you), and validates every TIN and address. It shows your preparer a clean 1099 worklist — who's reportable, who's over threshold, whose TIN is missing or malformed. The preparer reviews, fixes, and clicks Approve. Only then does the tool generate a filing-ready IRS e-file, render recipient PDF copies, and email those copies out via Resend.

What's inside the Implementation Plan

The downloadable plan is a step-by-step file you paste into an AI coding agent. It opens by interviewing you about your business — which accounting system you export from, exactly what your payment and W-9 columns are named, which forms and boxes you file, how you currently exclude card payments and corporations, your typical and peak vendor counts, and your messy edge cases — and then it tailors the data model, the thresholds, and every later step to your answers. This is not a generic template; the agent reflects a short spec back to you and waits for your thumbs-up before it builds anything. From there it walks the agent through the import, the dedupe-and-classify logic, the TIN/address validation, the preparer review-and-approve screen, the e-file and PDF generation, and the recipient email send — each step with a ready-to-copy prompt. There's also a fallback so you can build the whole thing today even with no API to your accounting system.

The governance it includes (this is the point)

This is real tax-prep tooling, so it ships with the controls a finance team needs: login so only your team can use it, row-level security so you only ever see your own organization's vendors, a complete audit trail of who reviewed and approved which 1099s and when, a hard human-approval gate so no e-file or recipient copy is generated until your preparer signs off, and duplicate guards keyed on vendor TIN so the same vendor can't be filed twice. Missing or invalid TINs are flagged for B-notice follow-up instead of silently shipping a bad return.

Who it's for

AP leads, controllers, and tax preparers who own 1099 season and are tired of rebuilding the same fragile spreadsheet every year. If you can describe how your shop decides who gets a 1099, you can build this.

You've got this — start with the plan, paste the first prompt, answer the interview, and you'll see your reportable-vendor worklist take shape the same afternoon.