A quick note before the accounting: I am not a CPA, and this post is not tax advice. For the tax side of trust accounting, the CPA I trust and send my own clients to is Peter Fider at Meatball Accounting. What follows is the operations side, the part that decides whether your January is calm or a fire drill.
The IRS is closing a door this year, and a lot of property management firms have not noticed yet.
FIRE, the Filing Information Returns Electronically system the IRS has run for years, is retiring in 2026. Its replacement is IRIS, the Information Returns Intake System. If you have been uploading your 1099 file through FIRE, that road is ending, and January is the wrong month to learn a new system with the January 31 deadline right in front of you.
Here is the part Rentvine users need to hear first. Rentvine generates your 1099 file. It does not e-file that file with the IRS. Those are two different jobs, and the second one has always been yours. IRIS is how you do it yourself, and uploading through IRIS is free.
To file through IRIS, your firm needs a TCC, a Transmitter Control Code. If you do not already have one tied to IRIS, that application needs to happen now, in October, while there is still room to breathe. Applications take time to process, and the line only gets longer as the year closes. January is the wrong month to discover you are missing a code.
While you are ahead of the work, handle the owner side too. The IRS requires written consent from the recipient before you deliver a 1099 electronically. That consent has to come first, not after the fact. And please, do not email 1099s. Tax documents carrying Social Security numbers do not belong in inboxes, yours or theirs. Consent on file plus a portal download is the safe route, every time.
In my experience, about 5 in 50 owners will still call asking for another copy of their 1099, no matter how clean your system is. Every owner who can pull their own copy from the portal is one less envelope, one less stamp, and one less phone call landing on your team in the busiest month of the year.
So here is the October checklist, in the order the work has to happen. One, confirm your IRIS access and get the TCC application in if you need one. Two, send your electronic consent forms out now, so owners return them through November and December at a human pace. Three, when January comes, generate the file in Rentvine, upload it through IRIS, and put the owners' copies in the portal where they belong.
New system, same deadline. The firms that set up IRIS now will not think about 1099s twice in January. The firms that wait will be learning new software against a deadline, and deadlines do not care how busy you are.
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