Tax Handicapped? Automate Your Process / Automate 1099 tax return eFiling, contractor management and IRS audit protection. Developed by CPA tax professionals.

Marissa Feinberg, Contributor for Forbes writes:  So, if you’re a business paper-filing your 1099s and W9s, you’re brushing right up against the end of February deadline. If you’re e-filing, you get another month.  If you’re a contractor/freelancer, you should have received your 1099s from the businesses you worked by the end of January. Got any delinquent client companies? Are you being a delinquent client company?  I think small business owners and starter-uppers face the biggest handicap when it tax time comes. They’re doing everything by themselves in the first place, and here’s one more responsibility. If it’s their first startup, the process and regulations are completely foreign. If it isn’t their first, sorting out what’s going on where among multiple ventures can be forehead-vein-bulging stressful.

And so, we trod off to tax accountants’ offices, at the mercy of any fee that suits their whimsy. Worse, you’re subject to judgmental glares and sighs as you shuffle through your disorganized stack of the year’s paperwork.  It’s not just you, though. Cameron Keng once worked on an audit of Goldman Sachs, and the company had lost 20% of their paperwork (!) — he had to recreate all those missing pieces.  Thoroughly traumatized by that experience, Keng is now a warrior against AWOL tax documents. He built autotax.me to retain all your contracts and tax filings and those of your contractors, helping to protect you against audit.

Reduce The Barrier That Stands Between You and Clean Books

Autotax isn’t meant to replace accountants. It’s a software as a service (SaaS) that helps businesses deal with their 1099s and W9s Keng wants Autotax users to get a lot of the tax-filing pre-work done ahead of time automatically, and to have control over the process to understand it — confidence that will help you need less work from the accountant (and maybe negotiate those fees). Autotax is free for independent contractors; for business, subscriptions come with a free trial and prices are rock-bottom low compared to other tax services. At last, a near open-source solution.

Cameron came to a Green Spaces Idea Bounce a few months ago, when Autotax was still in beta, asking for feedback on his startup-supporting startup. We overcame our own brains’ fierce resistance to even starting to think about taxes to help him come up with ways to get other entrepreneurs and small business owners to finding a less terrorizing approach to tax time.  And as of this posting, you’ve still got one and a half months til tax day for your own taxes. I’m wishing you, along with Cameron, a very stressless tax season.