Results Snapshot
- 80% reduction in support tickets from providers related to 1099 forms
- 80+ hours saved on 1099 form creation, issuance and delivery
- 70+ hours saved responding to support inquiries
Challenge
For telehealth platforms, success can come with a lot of growing pains.
For a New York-based mental health startup, their explosive growth—reaching 4,000 clients with big names like Microsoft, The Hershey Company, and Fujifilm—meant they needed scale, and fast. They built a contractor provider pool of 10,000 mental health professionals, from licensed psychotherapists and psychologists to family practitioners, to achieve personalized care for their patients around the country without the cost and overhead typically associated with a full-time workforce.
With that scale however, comes an administrative burden associated with ensuring tax compliance and issuing 1099-NEC forms to its thousands of providers.
This meant January “was a hectic time to say the least,” says their accounts payable manager. In years past, the company received thousands of inquiries and support requests from providers trying to resolve discrepancies or asking how to access their 1099 form, making the January 31st deadline from the IRS near-impossible to achieve. “Manually managing that process for thousands of providers is insane,” he says.
Solution
The accounting team vetted several 1099 filing services but ultimately determined they needed a more comprehensive solution that would give their providers access to support and resources that could help them differentiate from other telehealth companies. “With other platforms, support was essentially non-existent,” he says, because of the volume of support requests the company received during that time period.
Automation was especially important given the time it took to manually create, reconcile, file and deliver forms to thousands of providers. “In the past, we’d have to manually upload a providers’ W-9 and TIN information which could take more than a week of my time,” the account manager says.
The company was particularly impressed by the speed and accuracy through which Wingspan could help it meet the IRS’ filing deadlines while giving their providers a much more intuitive platform to access critical tax information. On Wingspan, TIN verification happens almost instantaneously, whereas other platforms typically take 24-48 hours to complete.
The platform automatically generates 1099-NEC forms based on verified W-9 data and delivers forms both via mail and the Wingspan app. The contractor help desk, which would give providers a fast and easy way to access their forms and get tax questions answered, proved to be the deciding factor for the finance team.
“When you work with thousands of providers like we do, it’s a huge relief to have a trusted partner to help manage the complexity behind that operation,” he says.
Providers can easily download their 1099 from the Wingspan portal and get reminded prior to filing to confirm their personal information and preferred delivery format. After filing, Wingspan would handle resolving suggestions and refiling should there be any discrepancies.
Results
Since implementing Wingspan, there’s been a dramatic difference in the volume of support tickets from its providers. In years past, the company handled thousands of emails from providers about their 1099 forms. This year, with Wingspan, they received only 100.
“We don’t need all-hands on deck anymore now that we’ve got Wingspan,” says the accounts payable manager.
The company’s accounts payable and finance team saved hundreds of hours, which allows them to focus on more strategic initiatives. He says, “I’ve been in AP for over 10 years and filing 1099 forms for a long time, Wingspan is by far the easiest process I’ve ever come across.”
With Wingspan, they’ve seen:
- 95% reduction in support inquiries from providers related to the status of their form and/or discrepancies with their tax information
- 80+ hours per team member saved during tax season by offloading 1099 filing and eliminating the need to manually track and retrieve 1099 forms
- 70+ hours per team member saved by using Wingspan’s self-service portal to address issues and questions from providers re: the status of their 1099 forms
He says, “Wingspan is an amazing tool for accounts payable and finance teams looking to manage large scale networks of 1099s. I’d easily take it with me to future companies.”
