WP1099 SaaS Discontinued – New Plugin Available

Today, we’re announcing that the WP1099 service is being discontinued. If you have used the WP1099 Connect plugin, it will stop functioning as a “bridge” between your site and ours. Updating to version 1.7 of the WP1099 Connect plugin will cause it to automatically deactivate itself on your site. Whether you have updated or not, you should delete the WP1099 Connect plugin from your site.

Why is the Service Being Discontinued?

The WP1099 service was designed to make it easy for site owners with affiliate programs or multi-vendor marketplaces to have 1099-MISC forms generated for them at the year-end. In order to do this, we needed our users (the site owners) to send us certain sensitive information.

Additionally, in order to file a 1099-MISC form, we needed to collect sensitive information from our user’s affiliates or vendors. This information could include things like social security numbers, or other tax ID numbers.

We received this information from one site owner, and zero affiliates or vendors in the five months since the service was launched.

There were dozens of site owners who downloaded and installed our plugin, yet we were only able to get this information from one of them.

As such, we realized that we were facing a hurdle that our users weren’t willing to work with us on. Perhaps it was a trust issue, or perhaps it was an issue that required us to better educate our users.

Regardless, the decision was made to discontinue the service. We did so to prevent WP1099 from becoming a bottleneck in year-end reporting for our users. In short, the effort that was supposed to make the service easier to use ended up making it more difficult.

Is the Service Being Replaced?

While the e-file service is no longer available, we are providing users with a new plugin option. The new WP1099 plugin will generate an export file with a summary of all payments made during the year that would require a 1099-MISC form.

This export file can then be used to prepare 1099-MISC forms on your own, or be provided to an accountant who can prepare them for you.

A flat, annual fee will be charged to the users of the new WP1099 plugin. This annual price will provide updates to the plugin to account for changes in the tax laws. It will also provide updates for compatibility with existing and new plugins.

We realize from the large number of site owners who expressed interest in WP1099 from the beginning that there is a need for tax reporting. Due to the difficulties mentioned earlier, we also realized that we’re not the ones who should handle the sensitive information. And that’s OK. We want to be as useful as possible while not asking users to provide information that they aren’t comfortable providing. We fell that the new plugin strikes a good balance between being useful and not asking for too much information.

Questions

If you have any questions about the new plugin, please contact us. We’ll be happy to answer any questions you have.

1 Comment

  1. Reflections on my first SaaS | World of WordPress on November 11, 2017 at 7:36 am

    […] I announced that the WP1099 e-filing service was being discontinued. WP1099 was my first software as a service (SaaS) offering, which despite […]

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