bjwhitson wrote: ↑Fri Jan 12, 2024 10:38 pm
One thing I just noticed is that, while I have Payroll Item Descriptions set up for Employer SSI and Employer Medicare, I don't actually use those items anywhere. I'm not sure how I would - do you think that's the problem?
BJW
I suspect this is the issue. If you have payroll item descriptions for Employer SSI and Employer Medicare, you should add them to every employee that has those deductions apply.
Meaning, in the Maintain Employee section of Payroll, find the employee, and add these pay items to the employee. Since you have the tax tables for SSI / Medicare already setup, these should auto-calculate and match the employee withholding amounts right then and there.
So, what I have for an employee, is the following payroll pay items in the maintain employee window.
Item Name: ----------------------
Item Type:
Admin Assistants----------------- Income
FED W/H:------------------------- Tax Deduction
SSI:-------------------------------- Tax Deduction
Medicare:------------------------ Tax Deduction
State W/H:---------------------- Tax Deduction
Employer SSI:------------------- Employer Liability
Employer Medicare: ----------- Employer Liability
Employer Pension: ------------- Employer Liability
*the employer pension is an employer contribution for lay employees that our church has.
Every pay item above has a value populated in the amount column for this particular employee.
What is nice is at the bottom of this same window, it shows the gross salary, tax deductions, any other deductions, the final check amount, but mostly the employer liabilities all added up for that one employee.
Now, since you would label the Employer portion of SSI / Medicare as an Employer Liability in the payroll item description, you can point those item descriptions to the proper vendor (IRS, for example). This way, when you need to create the AP for the IRS, you can use the 'Create Accounts Payable Entries' features of the payroll module in PC+.
The amount that shows for the IRS vendor should be the summation of all deductions + employer liabilities that point to the IRS vendor within the item description.
It makes my life easier, as I do not have to mess with the AP entry at all. It just auto-creates in the AP module. I still have to post it, and do the actual EFTPS payment, but that's straightforward; as the PC+ work is already done for me.
If I run a 941 tax deposit report for the given month, it separates out by pay items, so I can check that SSI and Medicare have matching Employer amounts, and then summarizes the three nicely between Fed withholding, SSI, and Medicare.
Then, when 941 time comes around, all the values properly show up in the 941 report at the appropriate spots, summed, and match what they are supposed to be (if one double-checks the math).
In summary, when I do it the way I describe above (as I also am using v14.4), all the numbers auto-populate in the 941 as needed, the vendor amounts for paying in AP, and calculate out correctly (if I were to double-check my math). So, it is much easier to run payroll now.
I assume what you could do is a backup, then run a mock payroll after adding the employer pay items; test out all the reports / math to see if it works. Then, restore.
I had to do this a number of times when I was trying to add these features because I couldn't figure out how to use some of these payroll options.
Hope this helps.