Making sure you are in compliant for taxes is essential. There are many tasks that need to be done for year-end.
1. Preparing 1099/1096’s
First, having your CPA prepare your 1099’s might just be a mistake and you could end up paying for in penalties and interest. 1099’s are not only just for “laborers” as many businesses have thought in the past. In addition, not collecting W9 forms prior to starting a relationship with a vendor may end up causing you delays and frustration when trying to prepare 1099’s in January. We encourage you to have a regular process of collecting them prior to paying their first payment and also correctly adding them to QuickBooks so you know you have received a 1099, and then if the vendor is eligible, select that option and for the vendors not eligible, don’t select that option. The next step in the 1099 process is going through the expenses by vendor report to ensure all your transactions are coded to the correct account. Once you have completed this review, then in Single User Mode, you can start the 1099 Wizard to further review the amounts for accuracy against eh vendors you have indicated are eligible to received a 1099. Remember that payments made to vendors that are processed through a “Third Party Payor” like a credit, debit, and Paypal, are excluded from your liability to report them on your 1099’s to them. Making sure your debit transactions are coded correctly, you need to enter DEBIT in the check number field. This makes QuickBooks skip those entries. Now once you know how many 1099’s you need, let us know and we can get you them quick and at 35% off.
2. Updating your Sales Taxes (Sales, Use, and Rent Taxes)
Every year you should verify with your state (and also the other states you are liable to collect and report taxes for) that there were no changes for the state tax, local county/city taxes, and also if you collect commercial rent, you will want to make sure you know what liabilities you have for collecting and reporting sales taxes for the rental properties. As in the case of Florida, there were more tax changes this year than in any year prior. Not only were there many rate changes, commercial rent taxes are less than the regular state tax. If you have “multi-tax” tax rates, make sure you correctly setup the individual tax item components, and then create the Sales Tax Groups in the QuickBooks item list, and then assign the rates correctly to the customer. Properly setting up the sales tax rates will make quicker work of filing the taxes.
3. Employee Payroll/W-2/W-3 Forms
If you are processing payroll in QuickBooks, you will prepare the forms as usual and electronically file your forms through QuickBooks (for all entities that allow electronic filing). If you have more than 200 W-2’s, you must file electronically to the Social Security Administration. Dues dates for different payroll forms vary by state. Check with your state for deadlines. Most payroll forms are due no later than 1/31/19.
4. Verify your QuickBooks Balance Sheet
Part of the maintenance in QuickBooks is to make sure your balance sheet is in balance. An out of balance Balance Sheet indicates either a corrupted transaction/s or that changes were made to the file that affected historical transactions. Commonly this is caused by inventory changes.
5. Run Open Invoices and Unpaid Bills reports
Running these reports (over the standard AR Aging/AP Aging reports) shows if there are transactions incorrectly posted or that shouldn’t be posted to that customer at all. We often see Bill Payment-Checks, or Journals that were entered to try and fix an issue but that has caused further issues.
6. QuickBooks File Maintenance
Often the QuickBooks files are treated like a Word or Excel document when in fact, it is a database. With the advancement of IT over the last decade, unfortunacalltoy many IT Professionals have done a disservice by being uniformed of the maintenance that should be done at least weekly with QuickBooks databases. The basic maintenance is to make sure your file is in Single User Mode, then go to File, Utilities, Verify Data. Should you get any results other than “QuickBooks detects no problems with your data”, you would reach out to us for assistance. If you decide to try and repair the file yourself, please note that if you start a “Rebuild” and it cancels for any reason (internet/network drop, major corruption aborts your file, power to the PC/Server fails, etc.), the file will immediacalltoy be corrupted so please do any maintenance with extreme care and caution. Preparing a manual backup weekly in Single User Mode and with Full Verification will keep you informed if you file should ever become corrupted. We are experts in database issues and can help you with any of your issues, mild or severe.
Whether you need consulting, bookkeeping, CFO/Controller services, software, checks, 1099/1096. W-2/W-3 forms or just some advice, we are your one stop source. Our expert team is available.