Terms of service

What WithholdWatch is

WithholdWatch is a monitoring tool. It takes the contractor payments you record or import, compares each payee’s reportable total against published IRS thresholds, identifies the payment that crossed a threshold, and reports the backup withholding already required where a valid W-9 is not on file.

Everything it reports is arithmetic performed on figures you supplied and figures the IRS published. It does not interpret your circumstances.

What WithholdWatch is not

WithholdWatch reports payments against published IRS thresholds. It is not tax advice.

It is not a filing service: it does not transmit information returns to the IRS or to any state, and it does not hold the taxpayer numbers that filing requires. It is not a legal opinion on worker classification, and nothing in the product should be read as one. It is not a substitute for an accountant or an attorney, and where a figure matters you should have one look at it.

Accuracy, and the limits of it

WithholdWatch computes from what it has. Payments you have not recorded are invisible to it, and a figure produced from partial data understates — always in that direction. The product states this on the screens where the figure appears; it is repeated here because it is the single most important limitation.

W-9 status in WithholdWatch is self-reported by members of your workspace. WithholdWatch does not verify a form against the IRS, and marking a contractor as having a valid W-9 reduces their figure to zero without any check that the form exists.

Where the IRS has not published a threshold or a rate for a tax year, WithholdWatch shows that it has not been published and produces no figure for that year. It will not estimate one.

Your account and your workspace

You are responsible for who you invite to your workspace and for what they do in it. A member can add, change and delete records, and an administrator can remove members. WithholdWatch records who made each change in an activity log, but it cannot undo a decision you authorised.

You must not share credentials, and you must tell us promptly if you believe an account has been compromised.

Your data

Your contractor and payment records are yours. WithholdWatch stores them to provide the service, and you can export all of them as CSV at any time on any plan, including the free one.

WithholdWatch does not sell your data, does not use it to train anything, and does not share it with other customers. What it collects and why is set out in the privacy notice.

Acceptable use

You agree not to:

• upload full taxpayer identification numbers — the product rejects them, and attempting to defeat that is a breach of these terms;
• use WithholdWatch to store data unrelated to contractor payments and information-return compliance;
• attempt to access another workspace’s data, or to probe, scan or test the isolation between workspaces;
• resell or white-label the service without a written agreement.

Plans, billing and cancellation

The Free plan has no expiry and requires no card. Paid plans are billed monthly in advance through Stripe. Prices are as published on the pricing page at the time you subscribe.

You may cancel at any time from your account. Cancellation takes effect at the end of the period you have already paid for, and your workspace then continues on the Free plan within its caps. Nothing is deleted on cancellation.

A feature marked “in development” on the pricing page is not available yet. Subscribing to a plan that lists one does not entitle you to it before it ships, and the marking is there so that this is clear before you pay rather than after.

Availability

WithholdWatch is provided as it is, without a service level commitment. It is at its first release; there will be defects, and some of them will be in figures. Report anything that looks wrong and it will be investigated as a priority, because a wrong figure in this product is worse than no figure.

We may change, suspend or withdraw features. Where a change affects how a figure is computed, it will be described in the changelog.

Liability

WithholdWatch’s figures are informational. Decisions about withholding, filing and payment remain yours, and you remain responsible for your own tax obligations whatever WithholdWatch shows.

To the fullest extent permitted by law, liability arising out of your use of WithholdWatch is limited to the amount you paid for the service in the twelve months before the claim. On the Free plan, that amount is nothing, and you should weigh that when deciding how much to rely on it.

Changes to these terms

Where these terms change materially, the change will be noted in the changelog with its date, and the “last updated” date above will move. Continuing to use WithholdWatch after that date is acceptance of the revised terms.

Operating entity and governing law

Two things in a contract cannot be written honestly in advance: who the contract is with, and which courts hear a dispute about it. WithholdWatch has not yet named a legal operating entity or a governing jurisdiction, and rather than print a placeholder that reads like a commitment, this clause says so.