Every year we face issues with 1099 forms in Quickbooks. Intuit is always late to the table with a rush update to allow printing of 1099s. They also seem to be way behind updating their code and struggle consistently with their Quickbooks installer and updating module. Any company offering a new product with this many bugs would never get off the ground. A reminder of how monopolies destroy innovation.
This year however is just a bit worse than usual. The eagerly awaited update refuses to install. Despite all available "critical fixes" the forms print 2 entries per page using the old format. How do we fix this?
Spend 3 hours with Quickbooks support uninstalling, reinstalling, updating? After running the gauntlet I have the following pieces of advice for those in the unfortunate position of being locked into the Intuit monopoly:
1. Uninstall Quickbooks completely from the computer. All versions of Quickbooks must be removed from the installed applications list. Search the start menu for "add or remove programs". Remove all versions of Quickbooks from the computer.
2. Open File Explorer, Select the C: drive and open both "Program Files" and "Program Files (x86)" folders and delete the "Intuit" folder from both locations.
3. Reboot the computer for good measure if you can.
4. Download a fresh copy of Quickbooks from downloads.quickbooks.com
5. Install Quickbooks freshly.
6. Open Quickbooks, press Esc to exit the first window, use the "Help" menu to run updates.
7. After all updates have downloaded, close Quickbooks.
8. Open TaskManager (search for it in the start menu). Check the list of tasks to make sure the "Quickbooks" task is not running (does not appear in the list of processes). If you see it anywhere in the list, Wait a couple minutes to see if it closes by itself. Do not proceed until you see that the Quickbooks process is gone from the list.
9. Launch Quickbooks newly. Hopefully you will see the brief message "updating quickbooks". If not, try restarting your computer.
10. Try printing 1099s. If this step fails the only option is to begin again with step 1 or gamble with Quickbooks support.
Take note of one key factor: 1099 expense accounts cannot be assigned to both 1099NEC and 1099MISC. You must remove the account mapping from MISC in order to be able to assign it in NEC and vice versa. If the account is greyed out for the NEC mapping, open the wizard to print 1099MISC (even if you do not need to print them) and exclude all categories there and select "save and close". Then you should be able to select those accounts for NEC. Good luck.
