For those of you still having this problem, I FINALLY was able to solve it once and for all! Last year, I started having the issue many of you are having where my contractors are entered correctly and when I go to "Prepare 1099s" it is a frustrating loop where they will not show up in the list that are eligible to prepare a 1099 because they are "below the threshold" when CLEARLY they are above! The constant same replies by support here over and over again are annoying because many of us have stated we have already made sure the "Track for 1099 Payments" is checked and they were paid with a check (NOT CC or otherwise). Last year I spent hours on the phone with support with no solution and I had to go to tax1099.com to file.
Well today I finally received an EXTREMELY experienced and knowledgeable Intuit customer service rep who specializes in 1099 issues. THANK YOU BRANDY - YOU ARE MY HERO! Here are the things that worked for me. I actually tried all of these things individually, but once I did the following all together IT WORKED!
1. First, you have to make sure that you have your Chart of Accounts for subcontractors set up in the way that makes QuickBooks happy and recognize the contractors properly. You should have a category called "Contractors" set up as an EXPENSE (not a COGS category as I had it set up. Then, you categorize any payments to your contracts into this expense category in your Chart of Accounts. Of course, you can have subcategories under the main and everything will fall in line, but the main thing is that it has to be an expense account, NOT a COGS account...and all of the contractor payments you want to include have to be in there.
2. AFTER you have completed step one above, then you hit the "Prepare 1099" button and it takes you through the prompts. You might have to keep hitting the "Back" button to start back over if you've already tried the process a million times without luck (as I did). Once you get back to the main screen at the beginning where you check the boxes on the list (it says "Categorize payments to contractors" at the top, you need to select the FIRST BOX under "Common payment types" that says "Non-employee compensation (most common)", and then you will select your "Contractors" category that you have set up as an EXPENSE in your Chart of Accounts.
From there, you should be able to hit "Next" on through to complete as normal. It seems like such a simple thing, but that is what fixed it for me. I truly hope this helps someone else because this was an agonizing glitch for me the past two years!
I actually even tried Step 1 on my own, but then when I went through, I think I was trying to check a different box with either Box 2 or Box 7 (under "Direct Sales" in both NEC and MISC). I tried so many different combinations that my eyes were crossing, so I guess I never tried the combination of that configuration in Chart of Accounts with the Box 1 of 1099-NEC selected.
