Unit and Abound Partner to Make it Easier for Freelancers to Plan and Pay Their Taxes

The U.S. freelance workforce continues to grow at a rapid pace, further accelerated by COVID-19 and seismic trends towards remote work and greater workplace flexibility. By 2027, over 86.5 million people are projected to be freelancers and will make up a majority of the U.S. workforce.

Unit’s mission is to make it easy for tech companies to build financial features into their products, including financial features for freelancers and independent workers. That’s why today we’re excited to announce our partnership with Abound, an independent benefits API, to make it easier to help independent workers automate their taxes.

Despite the growth of the gig economy, freelancers don’t have the same access to benefits through their employers, such as tax withholding, health insurance, and retirement plans. Through the partnership, Unit and Abound will help companies serving freelancers to simplify the complicated world of tax withholding and quarterly estimated tax payments for the 1099 economy.

The Unit and Abound Integration automates the account creation, tax withholding calculation, and money transfer required to pay a tax authority (like the IRS) – all while keeping your users’ tax liability up to date. Fintech apps like Lance are already leveraging the Unit and Abound integration to power automated tax contributions and payments through a dedicated Tax Withholding Account.

Getting set up with your Unit and Abound integration is easy. Once enabled for your Unit organization, the integration with Abound will automatically:

• Open a Unit Tax Withholding Account for each one of your users;
• Detect your user’s income in real time, suggest their withholding rate and transfer the right amount into their Tax Withholding Account;
• Automate the identity verification, enrollment, and money transfer required to pay a tax authority (like the IRS); and
• Update your users’ tax liability after each tax withholding and payment.

Existing Unit and Abound customers looking to get started, please visit the Abound doc site.

The Unit and Abound integration is another key partnership as we look to transform the fintech ecosystem and empower builders to create the next generation of financial features. Like many other custom flows that Unit clients have built, the integration leverages Unit’s openness and programmatic extensibility points, from webhooks to tags.

To learn more about the Unit and Abound integration, contact us to request sandbox access or book a demo.

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