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:

https://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.

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?