Stripe Acquires Payable To Expand Tax Reporting Tools For On-Demand Businesses

Stripe has acquired long-term partner Payable in an effort to bolster the tax reporting tools available to its on-demand and marketplace business customers.

According to Tech Crunch, the company’s Stripe Connect product aims to make it easier for its users to not only process payments from customers, but also make payments to contractors and vendors.

“We heard from our users that accurately generating, delivering and filing tax forms for as many as hundreds of thousands of vendors, contractors and partners in multiple countries was a consistent difficulty and something they’d like to see fixed,” Stripe engineer Jorge Ortiz wrote in a blog post.

Stripe’s acquisition of Payable, which has a system that allows businesses to easily generate 1099 tax forms, comes after multiple years of partnering to make tax reporting easier for businesses with payouts to contract employees. The companies started working together in 2015 to provide 1099 forms to Stripe Connect users — such as large-scale, on-demand companies like Lyft and DoorDash — enabling them to simplify tax reporting.

The partnership expanded last year through the sharing of resources and communication via Slack, and the companies were able to process 10 times as many 1099 forms as the year before. By integrating with the Stripe API, Payable could easily generate tax forms for the hundreds of thousands of vendors and contractors to which Stripe Connect customers made payments over the prior year.

In a blog post, Payable co-founder Peter Terrill wrote that the company “brought on more users in January of 2016 as part of the partnership than we had in the previous two years combined.”

Stripe will now be bringing the company’s product and expertise in-house. For existing Payable customers, the company’s tax reporting tools will continue to be hosted on payable.com through the next tax season. Stripe will then integrate those tax reporting features — and make them available free of charge — for Stripe Connect users as part of the Stripe Dashboard.