Send all those W-9's using PDF Forms.
Around this time of year, many freelancers and other small creative businesses in the United States start receiving requests for a lot of W-9's and other tax-related forms from their clients.
Tax advice is well beyond the scope of this tips newsletter. However if you are getting a lot of requests for W-9's this month, you can streamline things by using the editable PDF Form provided by the IRS:
http://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/fw9.pdf
Pre-fill all your company's details and keep a copy of the form handy for when clients request it. Other tax forms can be found as PDFs on the IRS's Forms and Publications site.
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Source: This tip originally started as a tip on using Digital Signatures in PDFs. Designer Darlin Gray was emailing her yearly W-9 Forms to all her clients and asked about adding digital signatures to those PDFs. After some research it appears that the function of the W-9 is fulfilled for most freelancers whether it is signed or not — so this isn't a good example for using digital signatures.
Any good digital signature examples? We'd like to open this topic up to our readers. We get occasional calls from clients interested in using digital signatures for various business purposes. So far, we have not seen many real-world examples of them in use. We are looking for some solid examples that might provide the basis for a future tip. Anyone got something good?
Comments
I just place the PDF on one layer in InDesign, then type the pertinent info on another (try 12/24pt). My signature is scanned. Then save as a PDF with appropriate date and ship to client.
Could do in Quark too, just can't preview as clean.
Posted by: Nancy Raymond | January 28, 2007 04:49 PM
I do the same as Nancy (type in the info myself). I saved my (scanned/traced) signature as a stamp and use that when necessary. Before the stamp, I just exported my traced sig to PDF, then copied/pasted it into a W9. Only need to do this once a year, btw ... clients don't care what the date is as long as it's for the current tax year.
Re your second question about using digital signatures, I've had to use them in the past for contracts sent as PDFs. I just digitally signed one a couple months ago.
Lynda.com has a great online video tutorial in their Acrobat Pro 7 lessons about creating and using digital signatures in PDFs.
Posted by: Anne-Marie Concepcion | February 4, 2007 07:24 PM