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Show HN: Painless1099 – automated self-employment taxes

painless1099.com

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Re: Show HN: Painless1099 – automated self-employment taxes

#41

Post by character »

pumblechook wrote: post #24

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 reasonabl…

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.

Re: Show HN: Painless1099 – automated self-employment taxes

#42

Post by deuce42x »

meesterdude wrote: post #22
acallwood wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 m…

> 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.

Re: Show HN: Painless1099 – automated self-employment taxes

#43

Post by acallwood »

meesterdude wrote: post #28
Androider wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

Re: Show HN: Painless1099 – automated self-employment taxes

#44

Post by tommynicholas »

tdicola wrote: post #35
tommynicholas wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The accounts are FDIC insured and held in an accredited bank according to the website. $250k of insurance per account.

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.

Re: Show HN: Painless1099 – automated self-employment taxes

#45

Post by tdicola »

tommynicholas wrote: post #44
tdicola wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Perfect, thanks for clarifying! Yeah it wasn't really obvious if this is an account Painless 1099 owns or the user owns. Thanks!

Re: Show HN: Painless1099 – automated self-employment taxes

#47

Post by acallwood »

newjersey wrote: post #31
acallwood wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. =)

Firstly, thank you for https everywhere. I see you have fees schedule here: https://painless1099.com/home/fees Are you guys from Nebraska? Did you just randomly pick Lincoln Savings Bank to partner with? https://painless1099.com/public/docs/33611.pdf 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 trans…

1) https is life.

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.

Re: Show HN: Painless1099 – automated self-employment taxes

#48

Post by fencepost »

ents wrote: post #32

"Confirm Password must contain an uppercase and a lowercase letter, a number, and must be at least 8 characters long" C'mon.

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."

Re: Show HN: Painless1099 – automated self-employment taxes

#49

Post by CPLX »

baus wrote: post #46

A company doing something similar closed down last year: https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/zen99

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.

Re: Show HN: Painless1099 – automated self-employment taxes

#50

Post by hangoverhammers »

jordanlev wrote: post #38

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!
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