Friday, January 11, 2008

My 1099-MISC Solution

Is anyone else having trouble using BIP to get their 1099-MISC forms how they want them? Well, at my company we previously used pre-printed triplicate forms where Copy B and Copy 2 were sent to the recipient and Copy C was kept by us (the payer). The forms caused issues with alignment on the pin feed printer and were also time consuming because they had to be torn apart. Pin feed printer? Are those still around? Anyway....

Enter XML Publisher and the laser printer solution! Oracle provides a 1099-MISC template. The seeded template (called 1099 Forms if you want to do a template search) is a .PDF template and only contains Copy B that will print 1 recipient per page. The document doesn't have IRS wording on it and would require your company to include an additional piece of paper in the envelope. This format didn't meet our needs, so BIPgirl was called upon to save the day!

What was our solution? Create new .rdf templates of course! Seeing that we've been sending recipients Copy B and Copy 2, I created 1 .rtf template with those 2 layouts on it (going by what is on the IRS website). When inserting the XML tags from the seeded report APXT7F99, I have the same recipient's information print on 1 page. I then created a second template with Copy C. In this template I have 2 recipients print per page.

But what about the IRS wording? I was hoping that you wanted to know about that. Going back to how time consuming the triplicate forms were, we didn't want to stuff extra pieces of paper into envelopes. To get around this, we contacted our paper vendor and ordered custom stock. This new stock has a perforation in the middle so that Copy B and Copy 2 can be torn apart by the recipient and folded to fit into window envelopes by us. Then we had the IRS wording printed on the back of Copy B and viola! we have our forms to mail out in our custom window envelopes. As for Copy C, we just keep them for our records so they could be printed on white paper to save on the custom stock cost.

So if anyone else is out there struggling or spending too much time dealing with pre-printed forms, try this solution. It really saved us a lot of time and money!

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hi BIPgirl,
I was really happy to see this blog entry. I've been struggling with needing to modify the 1099-MISC as well and I've given up trying to modify the .pdf. Can you elaborate a bit on how you created your .rtf template ? Were you able to save the seeded .pdf as an .rtf or .doc file or did you draw it yourself? I am stumped.

Anonymous said...

Hi BIPgirl,

I too am stumped. How did you replicate Copy A for IRS? I have given up on modifying pdf as well. I created from stratch new rtf for Copy B to print 2 on a page however for some pages it takes the boxes to another page. Can you please share your rtf? Really stumped here. (email: orafin@bellsouth.net, thanks in advance)

Anonymous said...

Congratulations BIPgirl on your most elegant solution! I despise these 1099-MISC laser forms from Office *****, firstly their software didn't work, then I realized that their count wasn't per page but two-per (a real pain when multiple clients have single contractors), not to mention cost, plus the alignments between A, B, C, 1 and 2 are not printed precisely. Whatever, this will be the last year of that mess. Anyways, I've found that only Copy A (in red) needs to be MICR, which could be submitted through e-services or FIRE and the others can use regular laser stock (two FORMS unique per page, Kudos to you).

Now if only I could find the other forms on PDF, with correct alignments.

Thanks for the awesome tips!
-remove Ls (wiLLzard@invLLed.org)

Wizard said...

@first-anon-comment,

I wouldn't recommend trying to replicate Copy A, the IRS needs these forms to precise specs to scan them automatically including (layout, fonts used, MICR toner, etc).

I ran across the spec sheet, Revenue Procedure 2007-50, Publication 1179, "General Rules and Specifications for Substitute Forms 1096, 1098, 1099, 5498, W-2G, and 1042-S" at http://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/p1179.pdf

What a read! Good luck

-wiz

BIPgirl said...

Glad I could help you out!