LLC Tax Reporting Vendor forms before January
Steven Palmieri, a Tax CFO and the Entrepreneur's CFO, builds the vendor file before January so the forms follow the payments.
See the vendor fileThe form follows the file.
A vendor form is only as good as the record of who was paid. We ask for the vendor's own form before the payment when we can, and we keep it with the vendor, not in a pile labeled January. In January the work is printing what the file already knows. It is not interviewing the bank statement for names nobody wrote down.
These pages do not print a dollar threshold. Thresholds move, and a stale number causes both missed forms and needless forms. The practice on an engagement uses the threshold for that year. The page stays on the habit, which is to collect the form early and to track the payments in the books.
What the company is, and what the vendor is.
Your own classification does not decide the vendor's form. A disregarded company, a partnership, an S company, and a C company can all pay vendors. The question is the payment and the vendor's status, which the vendor's form is supposed to answer. We do not guess the vendor's tax shape from the name on the check.
Wages are not vendor forms. Wages go through the provider you run, on the payroll account we help you set up. A person who should have been paid as an employee does not become a vendor because the form in the drawer is the vendor form. If that mix has already happened, say so on the call. The repair is not a second form on top.
Owners are a separate question.
Money to an owner might be a wage, a distribution, a loan repayment, or a contribution coming back. The classification says which of those exist. A vendor form does not answer it. On an S return, pay for services is the wage conversation. On a partnership return, a payment to a partner is often a draw against the capital we roll forward. We label the payment in the month it happens.
If an owner also invoices the company for a separate trade, that is a vendor fact and an owner fact at the same time. The books have to show both. We will not collapse them into one line called owner.
A file that is already thin.
If January is close and the forms were never collected, the work is a list of who was paid and a stack of requests, sent now. We would rather file from a short honest list than from a reconstructed one that includes the office landlord and excludes the contractor who was paid in cash. Bring the bank download. We will not invent a recipient.
The company return and the vendor forms have to be able to sit in the same room. A large expense with no vendor and no form is a question, not a deduction we will defend from silence. We settle that question while the month is being closed, ahead of assembling the return.
Ask about a form
You will be talking to the Steven Palmieri practice.