Keep Your Referral Program Tax Compliant Painlessly With a Spoonful of Sugar

Jessica Edmondson — February 14, 2017 Follow @ContentMktg2

A spoonful of sugar to make the medicine go down. This line from Mary Poppins can be applied to many areas in life, but what about keeping your business tax compliant? If you are like many companies looking to drive organic growth by running a referral program, tax compliance needs to be addressed. Marketing needs to take a proactive role in this in alignment with Finance. Ultimately, Finance needs all the info on payouts and the tax information of your advocates in order for 1099’s to be properly submitted at the end of the year.

So what is a spoonful of sugar for tax compliance? The answer is automation. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if you had it as easy as the children in Mary Poppins when they cleaned the nursery? With a snap of your fingers your referral program is suddenly nice and tidy and tax compliant. With the advancement of referral program software, automating tax information collection and reporting is almost that easy. But if your referral program still has a manual process of tax collection from customer and partners who have made referrals and received rewards, tax compliance is much less like Mary Poppins and much more like the reality TV show Hoarders.

Make referral program tax compliance simple and easy

Why does referral program tax compliance end up being so daunting? With the different advocate information that is needed to keep your referral program tax compliant it can become quite confusing. This information includes:

1. What determines if an advocate needs a W-8 or W-9 form?
   
2. What is the difference between a W-8BEN and a W-8B3N-E?
   
3. When do you send a 1099 to an advocate?

And it’s not only these question that make tax compliance difficult, but the question of when to collect this information and how to motivate referral program advocates to fill out the tax information.

While tax compliance may never be fun, it can be easy. In the whitepaper, What you need to know about Referral Program Tax Compliance, you’ll learn the answer to all of these question and more. Discover how investing in a referral software that automates tax compliance removes the operational hassle of tax compliance to allow you to redirect your focus on making your referral marketing program successful.

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