Well now I've been sufficiently reminded of why I hate doing accounts payable. For damn near five years I've floated along mainly on the Accounts Receivable side of the accounting world...billing and collecting. It's a happy little life. Last spring when my company sold one of it's major publications to a competitor and downsized my department once again (in the last three years it's gone from a department of eight to a department of two, and I'm the only little fish left in the pond) I was forced to take on the life of A/P once more and until the last three days, it's been pretty much no sweat. Yeah. I'd forgotten the dreaded IRS curse of form 1099 MISC preparation. I'm ready to be a waitress again. After wading through forty-five pages of instructions, you know in that lively technicolor IRS prose, I still wasn't confident I knew who all was supposed to get one, but I took my best shot. Thank goodness we're not in the business of selling fish, that's all I can say about that. YIKES. So then I entered all of this information into the computer, and began printing...I did a test page and it looked lovely...so I was off to the rodeo. But alas the next FIFTEEN pages printed all funky-dory. Apparently I'd done the wrong kind of test page. So I sifted through another twenty or so pages of "help" on the 1099 "HELPER" program and found my error, printed five or six new test pages just to be sure and started again only to find out that my mistake had left me short ONE form. So I hiked over to the IRS office (good thing its within walking distance and I had my MP3 player...I'm almost out of gas) to get more forms. I got FIVE extra to be on the safe side. Of course when I got back the printer fritzed out on me, and the "techie" (and don't even get me started on the miserable condition of technical support in our office) was at lunch so I finally got them all printed at about 1:30 today, organized them and put them in a beautifully labeled file and took them to my boss to sign.
"Put them on that chair over there, I'll deal with those next week."
What do you suppose the Scottish word for YAPIMA is?
So if you are an independent contractor, a lawyer, or some other Yahoo waiting for your pretty little 1099 from some small company so you can file your taxes this year...if it comes in time...you owe an Accounts Payable clerk somewhere a massage. And if you get a refund you also owe her (or him...I know they're out there) a drink...maybe two.
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