Tax season has a way of sneaking up on accounts payable teams. One day it’s October, and the next it’s the last week of December, and someone is scrambling to figure out which vendors need a 1099. The good news: NetSuite already has most of what AP teams need to prepare for tax season built in or supported through add-on bundles which are free and widely available. A few proactive habits can turn year-end from a fire drill into a formality.
Here’s what AP and finance teams should know about preparing for tax season in NetSuite, including why 1099 vendor onboarding is the single highest-leverage habit to build, plus where automation can remove the manual work entirely.
1099 reporting doesn’t have to wait until year end
One of the most common tax season stressors for AP teams is 1099 reporting, and the biggest misconception is that it needs to happen at a specific time. It doesn’t. 1099 configuration in NetSuite can be set up on the first day of the year or the last, because the underlying transaction data has already been captured all along.
Setup comes down to two components:
Flagging 1099 vendors. Each vendor record includes a checkbox to mark whether that vendor is 1099 eligible, along with an optional 1099 type. This can be done vendor by vendor or through a bulk CSV import, which is the faster route for teams catching up on vendors added throughout the year.
Flagging 1099 accounts. On the GL side, teams tag the expense and other applicable accounts with the relevant 1099 account categories. Once both pieces are in place, a saved search pulls in the full transaction history for those vendors and accounts, no matter when in the year the configuration happened.
From there, most teams export the data to a third-party bundle provider (Yearli is a common choice, alongside options like Track1099 and Sovos, which are all free bundles and widely available). These providers take the NetSuite export, generate the 1099 forms, and in many cases handle filing with the relevant agency for a per-form fee. It’s a fast, low-effort way to close out reporting compared to filling out forms manually or building a workaround in a spreadsheet.
The practical takeaway for AP teams: don’t wait until November to think about 1099s. The data is already there. The only real risk is discovering in December that a vendor’s eligibility was never confirmed, which leads to the next point.
Why 1099 vendor onboarding beats year-end scrambling
Chasing vendors for 1099 status in the middle of the holidays, right when tax season is bearing down, is one of the least productive uses of an AP team’s time. The better approach is capturing that information the moment a vendor enters the system, not months later, which is exactly what 1099 vendor onboarding in NetSuite is designed to solve.
This is where vendor onboarding design matters more than most teams realize. Building a question like “are you a 1099 eligible vendor?” directly into the vendor onboarding form means that information is confirmed on day one, along with banking details and other required data. There’s no need to circle back and ask vendors to self-report months after the fact, and no risk of tax season being the first time anyone checks.
The same logic extends to keeping vendor information current. A self-service onboarding form that vendors can update themselves removes another recurring AP task: manually following up every time banking or contact information changes.
Sales and use tax: A bigger, separate conversation
Sales and use tax in NetSuite deserves its own space, since teams handle it in a variety of ways depending on their setup. Whether a team relies on SuiteTax, Avalara, or line-level tax codes and tax accounts, the common thread is that accuracy throughout the year is what makes year-end reporting painless.
Getting tax codes right at the point of bill entry, rather than correcting them after the fact, is the piece that quietly saves the most time when standard NetSuite tax reports get run at year end. Automation that populates tax codes and tax accounts intelligently, based on vendor history rather than a static default, reduces the manual correction work that would otherwise pile up.
Where automation removes the manual work
Two pieces of the tax prep process are especially well suited to automation:
Tax code and account population. As bills come in throughout the year, invoice processing automation can populate tax codes automatically, and increasingly can do so dynamically, referencing what tax account was used for that vendor previously rather than relying on a single default account. That means less line-by-line correction and cleaner data flowing into year-end tax reports.
1099 vendor onboarding. Building 1099 eligibility questions into the onboarding form, rather than treating it as a separate outreach task, shifts the process from reactive to proactive. Vendors self-report their status when they join, AP teams get a CSV-ready list whenever they need it, and nobody is sending a flurry of “quick question” emails in December.
Together, these represent the core theme AP and finance teams should take into tax season: the data required for a smooth close is best captured continuously, not assembled under deadline pressure.
Charted Vendor Onboarding keeps you ready for tax season all-year long
Charted Vendor Onboarding solves these problems by moving the process of vendor onboarding out of emails and spreadsheets, and into a structured, automated intake process, designed to deliver data directly into your NetSuite instance. Instead of manually emailing a vendor with information and dealing with back-and-forth messages, AP sends a one-click invite with just a name and email address, and the vendor completes a secure, portal-free form directly, no login or password required.
The Charted form can be customized with your logo, capturing the exact information you need for tax purposes—including 1099 eligibility status, W-9s, tax IDs, banking details, contact information and anything else your organization requires—with data validation designed to catch errors before they reach NetSuite.
This results in an extremely efficient vendor onboarding process: by the time a vendor’s first bill is entered, their 1099 status is already confirmed, validated, and they can be paid immediately. There’s nothing the AP team should need to track down retroactively once tax season comes around.
Get the full walkthrough
Setting up 1099 reporting, tagging accounts correctly, and building 1099 vendor onboarding into your intake process are all manageable steps, but seeing them in action makes the difference between reading about a process and being ready to run it yourself.
Join our upcoming webinar, the AP team’s guide to a stress-free tax season, for a live walkthrough of 1099 setup in NetSuite and how Charted Invoice AI and Advanced Vendor Onboarding tools help AP teams get ahead of tax season instead of reacting to it.
