First off, let me echo what an amazing pain in the ass it is to be a 1099er, and how big a deal this can be for people. Kudos there. I'd ask for a little more transparency on how you guys make money and all - a $5 monthly fee for example, wouldn't be insulting. If you start talking about percentages, GTFO. And also data privacy and being clear that you do not profit off my data would also be important. Really just a clear alignment of business interests.
If I wasn't switching into a FT role, i'd be all over this.
But I always got paid via check, which went into my bank account. I think the thing that would make the most sense is to be able to setup a separate account with your own bank, so you can still direct deposit without worrying about ATM fees or what have you, and still be able to keep painless1099 in the loop of money by giving them access. Anything else introduces friction / fees that would deter usage; and i really really hate fees. (a reason i dont do paypal, for example)
> But I always got paid via check, which went into my bank account. I think the thing that would make the most sense is to be able to setup a separate account with your own bank, so you can still direct deposit without worrying about ATM fees or what have you, and still be able to keep painless1099 in the loop of money by giving them access. Anything else introduces friction / fees that would deter usage; and i really really hate fees. (a reason i dont do paypal, for example)
Sounds like they could make some referral cash off of referring people to checking accounts.
It works exactly as you described- money goes into your account first, then taxes are calculated and moved to your tax savings account. You can get paid via check, zero friction.
Connecting two existing personal accounts is something we've considered, but we've found that this doesn't necessarily help saving from a user perspective. The majority of our users love that they now have an account that is out of sight and out of mind. We haven't ruled out other options, but the current setup has been pretty well received by our current our user base.
FWIW, the second account WOULD be out of sight out of mind. you would just deposit into it, and then money would flow from it into your actual bank account via the service. Obviously, if you can get direct deposit, it works a lot better and you don't need such a setup.
But the very nature of 1099 means you could be working with a variety of clients, and are more likely to receive payment via check or other one-time method, versus direct deposit which is more common for W2 employees. I can't tell you how many one-off gigs i've had, or on/off where they just want to send me a check and thats the last i hear from them for months or ever; i'd get laughed at if i asked for direct deposit. (and did by a long term client: they like writing out checks)
If you want to actually solve this for 1099ers, your going to have to do more than just what works for a subset of users; and supporting checks absolutely needs to be on your roadmap at some point, at minimum. Otherwise... I don't think you really have any sympathy or understanding of the very field that you're trying to solve a problem for.
> If you want to actually solve this for 1099ers, your going to have to do more than just what works for a subset of users; and supporting checks absolutely needs to be on your roadmap at some point, at minimum. Otherwise... I don't think you really have any sympathy or understanding of the very field that you're trying to solve a problem for.
Totally agree here. We're working on getting some folks running on the current build & making sure it's stable, but we've already identified a couple options for remote check capture to be included when we get to building out native mobile. It's definitely key to serving a large portion of the total market.
From the FAQ:
"For now, we make small returns of interest on the money held in accounts. If we offer a Painless1099 Debit Card, which will allow us to track expenses, then everytime you swipe the card, we will get a small cut that is generally charged to a vendor."
I think the hard sell will be getting contractors to accept that payment will be delayed three more days by use of this service. A lot of clients pay late or require a bit of time and management to get your money.
You're totally right here, the time it takes for ACH to process is a tough wait. We're working on a few ways to speed up the process, but the way we think about it right now is that waiting an extra day or two is better than owing several thousand bucks because we couldn't be bothered to set cash aside and pay quarterly taxes. There's always a bit of a trade off with these things. As we grow, we're hoping to make the process 100% seamless, but figured we'd tackle the core of the problem to start and build out from there.
Thanks for the feedback! We're going to be charging a subscription fee down the road, but right now we're just stoked to be sharing our build with the world. Anyone singing up in Beta will get free withholding for life, which is a solid perk if you ask me. I'm a little biased though. =)
just curious, do you automatically send withholding to the IRS automatically? I guess you make money with the withholding money you take in every paycheck but only transmit at the end of a quarter?
I never thought about this. Does an employer do the same with W-2? Assuming you have 100 employees paid monthly and you withhold $1 for each employee per pay month... For example, if the pay for the month of January would send me back $100 which the employer gets to keep That $100 until the end of March? And same for the pay period of February? Is this illegal? I've read that you can't do that with payroll tax but is income tax treated differently?
Sorry if these are stupid questions. I don't have a background in accounting.
2)We are NOT from Nebraska, but we found an awesome tech-forward bank in Lincoln Savings Bank who saw a pain point in the 1099 world and got really excited about helping us build out a tax solution.
3) We don't automatically send quarterlies (yet) but we do send reminders and make it really easy to remit that payment every quarter. Shortly, you'll see an automated solution built into the product.
4) In answer to your W-2 question, yes, employers automatically withhold taxes for their employees and remit that money to the IRS throughout the year. Essentially the government holds on to this cash all year and if you've overpaid, you'll get a refund. This is what happens in a fair amount of W-2 job situations, but when you're self-employed, you're on the hook for taxes and are expected to separate funds and pay estimated quarterlies throughout the year - a tough thing to manage on top of client work, life, and whatnot.
If it's only worth $5 to you (~ one mobile game), it can't be that big a pain in the ass.
The correct price lies somewhere between $0 and the cost for you (or a CPA, $80-150/h) to do it. A percentage is fine too, as it's essentially risk free for the user (no income = no cost that month).
Actually it comes out to $60/yr, which isn't bad for just splitting off funds between two accounts. Obviously they could charge more - $10/mo wouldn't be bad either, still worth it there, which is $120/yr.
But it's not worth $100/mo, or 2% of my gross income, for example. I didn't make so much as a freelancer that i could tolerate either of those financially. And It doesn't remove the need for a CPA, just helps with the ability to pay that taxes you owe.
Not about risk, it's about people putting their hands in my pockets. I can only tolerate so much. I'll pay to solve the problem and make sure they can continue to do so for me, but if it becomes a matter of opportunistic behavior on the company's part, I'll go elsewhere or nowhere instead of being taken advantage of.
Our planned price point rolling out of beta will be $9.99 monthly, which puts you right in the $120 annual range as you mentioned.
And you're absolutely right, we don't remove the need to have a CPA, we DO, however, reduce the time you need to interact with your CPA and make it really easy for them to do their job. Given the hourly rate of my CPA, I've paid for Painless if I can reduce his work by almost an hour. We're finding that CPAs and freelancers alike are really digging what we've built thus far.
All in all, this is a product to help people like us solve the same problems we've run into over the years.
FWIW my CPA charges a flat fee ($350, in NYC, which is an expensive city) and does a lot for that fee. My taxes are complicated. I don't think this is uncommon, although I may have a discounted price.
Regardless of mechanics or feature set discussed elsewhere in this thread, selling me on an extra $120/year is an increase of 30% to my hard cost of dealing with taxes per year.
I've been working on this project for a little over a year as an advisor, primarily on the marketing and bank tech pieces of the business. The team saw an opportunity to make something (saving for 1099 taxes) that's unnecessarily complex much simpler, so they developed this nifty automated bank account to save from a user's self-employment income. You can set a fixed saving percentage, or let the software estimate for you based on your state and projected income. So far, we've seen developers, writers, real estate brokers, Airbnb hosts, and designers get value from the platform. The founders will be checking in here to answer questions, so ask away!
Man, if this would've been around a year or so ago! The whole 1099 process was by far the biggest pain point for me of being a contractor/sole proprietor.
What led you to address this problem from the banking, rather than accounting, side? For me, the banking part wasn't a big source of friction. It was keeping up with income and expenses, trying to determine what I could safely deduct, and coming up with a reasonable estimated quarterly tax bill (especially for my state taxes, which I could only send in yearly). After that was done, moving the money around was relatively trivial. Even if your product removes all that friction, I would still think that requiring users to open up another bank account and essentially give you control over all their revenue would be a huge hurdle to overcome.
Also, were I still a contractor, not being able to track expenses as well would be a deal breaker for me, especially in months where cash flow was tight. Yes, doing my taxes is a hassle, but compared with the hundreds or thousands I might save on a quarterly tax bill with expenses accounted for, it is a minor annoyance.
I think it depends on the primary use case (for accounting vs banking) - I know a lot of people who are earning barely livable wages as 1099 employees and they are often tempted to spend everything they earn (need to make rent and feed themselves) but then come April they haven't saved enough for their taxes and get screwed. Having a separate bank account that withholds the taxes for them first and then deposits 100% spendable money (just like a W-2 employee) would be really helpful for people in this position.
If you're coming at the problem with this use case in mind primarily, the approach they took makes sense. I think those people can benefit from this service the most too.
Have you looked at FreshBooks? You can sync expenses with your credit card(s) and bank account(s), categorize them, then view a Profit & Loss report to see your net income (income minus expenses).
Fwiw I use and am actually quite impressed with Quickbooks Self-Employed version, and I've never had a problem with 1099 management. They keep tax estimates for you in the upper-right corner so you always know around how much you will need to pay, and you can pay the quarterly taxes online through them via. eftps. While they don't auto-save for you, I'd argue you should be responsible enough to do this yourself. They were a bit buggy when they first released, but their support was pretty good to me and they have fixed all issues I've reported.
That being said, I'm not sure what this product can do for me over what I'm using now.
Actually, I just looked at their FAQ and they don't track expenses or anything... things you can do with Quickbooks.
Now I'm not trying to down this company, but just am pointing out to others that a mature version of this product already exists (minus the auto-save) and that I can't identify "why" I should switch over to Painless.
It's really the automation part that we drilled down on. To be honest, we love QBSE and don't consider them competition as much as we see them as a compliment to what we do. Tracking your tax obligation is great, but we take it a step further and just automate the cash that should be transferred out of your every day account and into one that you're less tempted to spend from. For a large portion of our 1099 peers, we see that the savings aspect is either A) hard, or B) a process that, if automated, could free up time to actually focus on work rather than having to actively (and manually) manage your taxes.
I'm a 1099-consultant and whenever a payment comes in, I just update a spreadsheet and transfer the amount to a separate savings account. It's not that big of a pain really, just takes a couple of minutes, but it would be nice to automate this with your service.
The only reason I'm hesitant to switch is because you're offering this for free. How do I know you're still going to be in business in a year from now? In other words, what is your business model?
Hi there! It's free for now as we offer perks for signup. We'll shortly roll to a subscription based service for access to tax withholding. We'll also introduce some premium features down the road to continue automating the tax portion of your consulting. Hope that helps!
There's a system for this already, sign up for EFTPS and the Treasury Department will automatically schedule and take out estimated tax payments. I just set mine up for next tax year and it's easy. Their website is awful and stuck in the 90's but it does work. https://www.eftps.gov/eftps/
Comment about your marketing website: I browse with cookies and localStorage disabled, and when I visit your site it's completely blank. I understand that if I were to create an account, log in, and utilize the functionality of your app that cookies (and/or localStorage) would be a requirement, but I don't understand why the marketing content wouldn't show up at all.
Solid find! Sorry for the issue you're having - we haven't seen this yet. We're running on Angular 2 and it looks like our auth, which requires cookies, is causing a crash. That's why you don't see any copy. We'll look into and/or report this to the Angular team. Thanks again! Very helpful!
A tool that does automatic withholding of business deposits in a savings account for taxes is something I've been dreaming of for a while, to the point where I even sat down for a bit to see if I could cook up my own tool to do it. Alas banks do not exactly go out of their way to expose a money transfer API...
This sounds exactly like what I wanted.. but I don't know if I want to be the early adopter guinea pig for something that involves setting up new bank accounts and automatically routing my finances around. I was kind of hoping my bank would eventually build conditional features into the automatic transfer / bill pay, as I'd much rather keep all my cash within my banking institution rather than sending it to an unproven 3rd party. Either way, I will be watching this closely..
Thanks for the feedback! FWIW, with Painless, your money is always accessible to you as it's in an FDIC Insured savings account. If (heaven forbid) we're not around in the long term, your cash is insured up to $250,000 and your new savings account is in a well-established financial institution at Lincoln Savings Bank. Really what we've done is use existing infrastructure to automate transfers that you'd be making manually, whether between two accounts in your existing institution or two accounts at separate ones.
This is something I manage pretty easily without a lot of fuss using a spreadsheet and one bank account with my 1099 business. I do a small volume of transactions with higher dollar values, so this might appeal more to high-volume businesses where the manual effort increases a lot.
I would be more interested in hooking in to the paying and calculating quarterly estimated tax payments.
Will this system do sales tax saving/payments? I pay those quarterly to my state just like the IRS estimated income payments and treat them essentially the same from a management standpoint. Any third-party system would need to be flexible to handle that, as well.
Can you go into a little detail about how well you currently cover state taxes vs. federal, quarterly payments, etc? The service I currently use doesn't really help much on the state level.
Totally - We handle withholding for your Federal AND State obligations. We collect a bit of information from you when you sign up and then our algorithm crunches based on your income and location.
As far as quarterlies go, we pass along reminders and quarterly filing instructions currently. In the near future, you'll be able to remit payment directly from our platform.
Yep. I'm one of the founders and we all run our payments through Painless.
True story - our accountant sent me my personal bill last week and I had a heart attack until I remembered I have an account with cash in it specifically FOR my taxes this year. It was a "duhhh" kinda moment, but I've been so programmed as a consultant to freak out about 1099 taxes, so it was my default reaction even after spending the whole year building a solution.
Last year I was hit with a massive IRS bill I was completely unprepared for. Saved some money, but not nearly enough. Something like this would have absolutely saved me.
We'd love to have you this year. One of my partners got slammed with something like a $15,000 bill two years ago. That was the impetus for building out a platform to automate what's typically a pain in the ass.
We're fans of Free Tax USA. They have a pretty solid self-employment offering, but we found that we still run into the issue of having to manually save throughout the year for our tax obligation. If anything, we've always thought of our product as a compliment to some of the existing platforms out there for filing.
This seems like something that is easy for me to do myself. I deposit a check in my bank account and either manually or automatically move some percentage of the money to a separate savings account. I guess I don't see what value this adds?
There are a handful of people who are in the same boat you are and handle their taxes on their own with no problem. That said, for the vast majority of us, setting money aside and not touching it is really (like, REALLY) hard. Painless gets cash from freelance gigs out of sight and out of mind before you feel like it's money you should dip into. Beyond that, the automation of a process you'd have to do manually otherwise is something we think everyone can get behind whether you have a process in place currently or not.
I never really considered this an issue. I've been self-employed since 2012 and kept a spreadsheet that calculated the quarterly payments I need to make, so I just sent that amount into a 1% APY savings account every time I got paid.
More recently, I took on a regular W2 job, and I've updated the spreadsheet so that it accounts for both W2 income (and any withholdings from that) as well as 1099 profit/losses (as I enter business expenses as well).
It was all pretty easy to set up and I just update it whenever tax brackets and standard deductions change (usually an annual thing).
Just to be the devil's advocate, what happens if this company goes bust and your tax money is stuck in their account and inaccessible? The IRS isn't going to accept some sob story about not having access to funds... I'd be very leery about putting an intermediary between my sole source of income and myself. Is there insurance? How do you know they're trustworthy?
Ok but who owns the account and how do you know they're trustworthy? I could open a bank account anywhere and ask you to start depositing your income there. You have to trust that I'll give it back to you though--FDIC won't apply.
Each account is a separate, FDIC insured account held with Lincoln Savings Bank. Your account is your account, there is no money pooling done. Painless 1099 is a front end to that account to let you do various things automatically and easily.
Does that make sense? I suppose technically just like your accountant could steal your money because they have access to your accounts there's some risk but not really.
Hi gents - a little late to the party here, but yeah, tommynicholas is absolutely right here. We help you open an account with our bank (Lincoln Savings Bank) and your money goes into an account in your name at LSB. If anything were to happen (heaven forbid) this cash is secure and guaranteed.
If anything, you could make a solid case about a bank going out of business before anything. But all jokes aside, before building anything, security of funds is something we made sure our users feel really good about and we found a great partner to make sure your accounts and deposits are insured!
I think Painless1099 IS on to something: taxes for freelancers are a pain, and no one wants to learn how to do it.
However, I think asking some people to change their bank accounts is going to be resisted. Also, waiting an additional 2-3 days to access your money when you're living paycheck to paycheck (as most independent contractors are) is not an option.
My cofounders and I are working on solving this same problem, however we took a different approach. (https://www.track.tax)
Track.tax creates a savings account in the user's name (same as Painless1099), but we also connect to the user's existing financial accounts to calculate taxes. Our chatbot (named Aida) communicates via SMS to ask simple questions to hash out the gory details. This means:
1. You can get paid via check, cash, or any other way you (or your clients) would like.
2. Money comes into your account first, then taxes are calculated and moved to your tax savings account.
3. Saving for taxes is as simple as responding "yes" to a text.
We'd love your feedback, and any comparison (strengths/weaknesses) you see between us an Painless1099.
Although we know solving this problem is really worth it, we'd greatly appreciate honest additional feedback from you guys, so feel free to text "HN" to TRACK (87225) and we'll give you a full year on the service!
Upper, lower, number, 8+ characters is actually a pretty loose requirement.
My standard spiel when I'm telling people the password requirements after giving them their temporary passwords is "You're going to have to change your password when you first log in. There are 4 types of characters: Upper, Lower, Digits and Punctuation; you're going to have to have at least 3 of those 4, it doesn't like your first name, it doesn't like your last name and your password must be longer than 8 characters. I recommend selecting 2 unrelated words that you can remember, changing at least one letter in each to uppercase, throwing a digit in before, after or between them and adding punctuation somewhere else."
strict password requirements are usually a requirement for regulated businesses (such as those creating back accounts). Having a secure password for an account that manages your money is a good thing!
This looks like nearly the tool I need: what I'm really looking for is a program that allows me to keep track of deductions and their reasoning. Also, some kind of facilitated back-and-forth with a CPA will be amazing?
Hey thanks for the feedback! We're building a small network of CPAs to allow you to get feedback in real time on some of our more nuanced tax question. Expenses and deductions you can expect to see down the road as well!
Oh man, i wish this had existed 5 years ago when I first started contracting. Estimating my taxes, doing withholdings, etc. was just a nightmare for me.
I might look into this if I go back into contracting at any point. Really cool! :)
Does the account earn interest? Right now I have an Ally savings account I transfer a percentage of my revenues every two weeks, so I'm earning 1% on my tax bill. It's small, but not irrelevant.
Is it really that difficult to put away 30-40% of every payment towards taxes? Not trying to be cynical, just having a difficult time understanding why a service is needed to perform a routine transfer.
Yep - this is pretty tough for the majority of independent contractors. Simply figuring out how much to save is the first issue, but the larger issue is ACTUALLY separating funds from your regular checking account so you don't spend these funds that should go to the IRS every quarter. We built Painless to automate what (admittedly) should be a "routine transfer" but often isn't and becomes a problem at the end of the year when we owe a huge bill that sucks to pay outright. The convenience of automating money movement is the big piece of what we do for our users. Hope that helps!
There's a lot of value in being able to hone in on the exact figure -- 31.8% based on your previous year's income and deductions -- giving you an extra 9.2% if you were conservative and putting aside 40%. I don't know if that's what this service can actually offer, just putting out there that it's more complicated than just setting aside a gross estimate like that.
Totally right - We withhold exactly the amount you need to set aside, as opposed to just blindly ballparking it as we've all done at some point (if we separated taxes at all). Taking the guesswork out of the amount we should be setting aside is a big piece of why we built Painless!
Hey guys! We're pretty familiar with the zen99 crew. For the most part, they were thinking about the same world as we are, but were tackling the problem a little differently.
I think as founders, we have a really bad habit of pretending out competitors are stupid and operating as if they didn't know what they were talking about. That's rarely the case in general, and certainly not the case in this instance. Tristian (CEO of zen99) wrote an awesome post mortem, which I think was just shared below, and it's been really helpful for quite a few of us in the fintech space. Continuing to read and build on the lessons that companies have learned before us is a big part of why we built the product we did as opposed to trying to replicate zen99 and hope it worked out for us. We really appreciate this thread and you guys pointing out the similarities between our companies!
Perhaps they still exist, but the internet exceeded the number of available slots for startups with the word Zen in the name and they disappeared from view.
If I wasn't switching into a FT role, i'd be all over this.
But I always got paid via check, which went into my bank account. I think the thing that would make the most sense is to be able to setup a separate account with your own bank, so you can still direct deposit without worrying about ATM fees or what have you, and still be able to keep painless1099 in the loop of money by giving them access. Anything else introduces friction / fees that would deter usage; and i really really hate fees. (a reason i dont do paypal, for example)
Anyway, great idea. I hope you can make it work.