idiot newbie question, 1099

[Mike or Penny Novack]

On 4/26/2016 5:08 PM, Lewis Balentine wrote:
> H'mmmm .... A very good point is that I probably do NOT know what I 
> was looking for.
>
> In a previous life (well it seems like a previous life these days) I 
> worked in IT supporting the accounting department with our ERP system. 
> I recall that we had to flag certain Vendor accounts and then classify 
> each payment to them. At the end of the year we ran a program that 
> extracted the flagged data and produced a list of Vendors and a total 
> dollar amounts. That information was then transferred to the 1099 forms.
>
> I noticed that the 'feature' had been used in the Quick books by 
> previous/current treasurer and assumed that we needed it. In reality 
> we only have one Vendor for which we might need to submit any 1099 
> data. I am thinking at this point it is not a sticking point.
>
> Thank you for the clarification.
>
> Lewis Balentine
> Houston, Texas 

That sort of thing was my line of country too (writing ad hoc programs 
for that sort of thing). And why I was asking the questions I was. In 
THAT environment (a large number) you would have BOTH been extracting 
data for an electronic filing (to the IRS) and a separate printing of 
1099 forms to be sent to the individual vendors. Not looking it up, I 
think if 50 or more of the same type of 1099 you have to file electronic.

But as you noted, there was a "year end" run to produce that list 
(probably also including what KIND of 1099 that vendor would get -- 
again going from memory, I think there is a special one for lawyers, 
etc. << I just do 1099-MISC as all I need to do are "other" >> )  
Probably, even in a fairly large operation there was human intervention 
at that point, looking up the "type" of vendor, though where I worked 
was of such a scale that we probably had that done by a program too.

What you are talking about (what Quick Books had) has come up in other 
contexts. A standard accounting system (all by itself) allows the CoA to 
have only one hierarchy. Some accounting packages have an extension 
which I will call "flagging". One or more EXTRA fields associated with 
an account so they might be selected/extracted differently according to 
values that had been placed in the flag field(s). In other words. 
select/extract THESE for 1099's would be just on example of the use to 
which such flag field(s) could be put. Previously people have asked for 
a whole range of other purposes they find missing. So yes, optional 
"flag" fields a useful extension, but gnucash doesn't have that feature yet.

Michael D Novack

PS: Not terribly hard for the developers to add BUT probably would need 
a fairly extensive user guide "how to properly make use of flags". And 
while it is one thing in a shop where there are programmers on hand to 
write ad hoc programs to make use of flags, quite another in an 
environment like this one where the poor developers would be swamped 
with requests. For which we can take your question as an example, since 
the first (of the MANY we have seen that could make good use of flags) 
wanting them for automated 1099's.