Sage 100 Payroll Year-End

The end of December is such a busy time for businesses. Inventories must be counted, payrolls must be completed and reconciliations must be done. On top of all of that time must be found to spend with our families. Here at MicroAccounting we ramp up our staff in anticipation of our clients’ needs during this critical time. I want to take a few moments and discuss some of the more frequent year-end challenges our clients face during this critical time-crunch time of year.

One of the primary needs at year end is loading new tax tables for payroll processing in the new year. Congress nearly always changes the tax laws which impact the amount of federal tax that is withheld from each paycheck as well as changes to the upper limits on which FICA taxes are calculated. This year looks to be no different. While the fight goes on in Congress it is anyone’s guess as to what the outcome will be. One thing is for certain, the tax tables will need to be changed at year end. If the Bush tax cut expire for everyone, the tax table changes, if there is an agreement on whose tax rate will go up, there will be tax table changes.

If the Employee FICA tax holiday expires, there will be tax table changes. As you can see, nearly every scenario will necessitate the update of the tax tables. Unfortunately, we probably won’t know what direction to go until very late in the year.

Sage has scheduled the tax table updates for the week of December 17th. Installation of the tax table changes should not occur until the last payroll has been completed. The tax table changes are available on the Sage 100 ERP (MAS90/MAS200) product home page of Sage’s customer website https://customers.sagenorthamerica.com. Customers who are current on their software subscriptions can login to download and install their tax table updates. This is where a lot of our clients contact us for assistance. We are happy to help you with this process, just give our office a call.

Another need at year end is the printing of the W2 forms. We anticipate a lot of questions will come from reporting the employer’s health insurance contributions on the W2 form. This can be done by setting up a standard deduction code with a box 12 code of DD.

In Payroll | Employee Maintenance, access each employee’s deduction window and add the new code along with the YTD amount of the employer’s contribution. If you have this information available on a spreadsheet you can use Visual Integrator to import this into your system. Contact our office if you would like some assistance. Electronic Reporting of W2s typically requires an update be installed. We won’t know for certain until the week of December 17^th the certainty of this update but it is generally required.

We assist many of our clients through these tough busy times. If you would like some assistance, please don’t hesitate to contact our office or email support@microaccounting.com and log a support call. We are here to help!