Happy New Year! With the busy holiday concert period closed, it’s time to take care of some important start-of-year administrative tasks. Here are four such tasks to consider tackling within the first couple of weeks of the new year.
Issue Form 1099 to Vendors
If you paid any of your performers, consultants, or other non-employees at least $600 during the last calendar year, you will need to issue a Form 1099 by January 31 of the new year. The IRS website has complete details and instructions. For practical purposes, it might be worth sending Forms 1099 to all your non-employee vendors. Two important notes:
- If you only accrued, but did not pay, a particular vendor fee in the last calendar year, you don’t need to send a Form 1099 until next January. For example, if you had a fundraising consultant do an ad-hoc project in late December to help with your year-end appeal, but the consultant didn’t send the invoice until January (even if the invoice was dated in December), the date of the payment is what matters for 1099 purposes.
- If you only paid a particular vendor by credit card, their payment processor will send them what they need for tax purposes (a 1099-K, which your organization itself might receive from, e.g., PayPal if you take payments through that platform) – this is why you wouldn’t send a Form 1099 to any hotel, airline, or office supply store where you only made credit card purchases.
Update Your Form W9
Some of your payors (particularly government agencies that make grants) might ask for a copy of your Form W9 with each annual grant award, and ask for a copy signed and dated within the last year. Proactively sign and date a fresh copy of a Form W9 and put it in a central file repository.
Check the Mileage Reimbursement Rate
The IRS generally updates this rate each year based on a variety of factors and posts the information online. If you have any employee reimbursement templates or similar tools that have this value pre-loaded, take a moment in January to update.
Update Footers with Current Year
The footer of your website, your Mailchimp emails, and similar shouldn’t still say © 2024 once it’s January of 2025! Check all these digital platforms and update accordingly.
