Do I need a tax ID?

How do you plan to do taxes?

Do you plan to have any employees under this entity?

No employees.

Not sure how an LLC works when I’m doing combined and individual work.

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No employees

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Are you and/or your brother paying yourselves to pay your personal bills (rent, food, etc)???

If so, then y’all are the employees of the business and need to keep company money separate from your personal money for many reasons, one of which is taxes.

It’s not as if you are truly self employed since you have a partner and y’all will have to file your personal taxes separately.

So I guess since we do the same jobs and only receive one payment for said job there’s no way to keep the business separate from each other. For instance when I do the jobs on my own it’s on my dime (fuel, material, etc) and when we do jobs together one of us will front the cost. When we’re paid that guy takes his cut for expenses then we split the rest. We’ve been doing this since we started at the beginning of the year and honestly we’d like to keep it this way. Simple and easy. I understand however this is probably all incorrect.

So there’s no way to keep it structured as it is for tax purposes?

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My brother in law and I started a landscaping business together.

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. What about in this instance when we operate as separate business but combined at the same time?

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I think you and your brother need to have a chat and figure out what it is you want to do.

You need to be in business together, or you need to have separate businesses. What you have proposed WILL result in a lot of drama in your relationship, because it's going to lead to distrust and accusations. When are you working together? When apart? Who fixes things? Who keeps the income? When do you keep a job for yourself and when does it become a partnership job?

I would recommend you form an LLC, get a tax ID, file an annual partnership return, get a checking account, and have all assets owned by the LLC.

Run all your jobs through the LLC.

If there is going to be some jobs you "split" the income/expense, and others where only one of you will get the income/expense, there are ways to handle this through the LLC. You are going to want to draft your operating agreement to allow for this, and what the "rules" are going to be for this. Basically, when allocating income, expense, and distributions, you recognize the fact that the two of you may not have equal work.

By the way, this is pretty common for law firms... a lot of law firms have partners who don't like each other / don't consider themselves in partnership together, they are just together for the name. They employ an "eat what you kill" approach that allocates income and expenses and distributions based upon your billings.

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So I guess since we do the same jobs and only receive one payment for said job there’s no way to keep the business separate from each other.

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Of course there is. Just like every other business in the world does it. When you get paid for a job the customer pays the company (GAFF Brothers Service for example). You buy gas, supplies etc with money from GAFF Brothers Service checking account. At the end of the week/month you and/or your brother pay yourselves for the work you did that week/month with money in said company checking account. Without doing this it will be impossible to account for income/expenses/taxes.

No different than say a dentist’s office operates. Do you think his patients are paying the dentist into his personal checking account and he pays his receptionist and assistants with his personal money? Of course not, money comes into and out of his business’s account.