Counting Active Employees in a Payroll Year

At the end of the year, there are a variety of reasons to get a list of employees that have been active throughout the payroll year. You can use a list of employees with activity to get a count of how many W2 forms you will need, sending a request to the employees to update demographic information, or as a checklist for human resource compliance.

A list of employees that have any activity in the current payroll year can be a bit tricky. By using one of the advanced features of SMB’s query tool, this list can be created.

To create a list of employees that have had activity in the current payroll year:

1) From the “5-2-1 Employees” screen, select the query tool with “File | Find”.

2) Create a new query by clicking the button.

3) Name the query “Employees with Activity”

4) Double-click on the fields you want to include. I usually include the basic demographic information of employee name, address, and phone number. This way the list can be used as a merge mail list. When finished, click .

5) You are now on the selection criteria screen. This is where the advanced trick comes into play. First, select a field that will only be populated if the employee has activity. My usual field for this is the Quarter Medicare Wages. There are four of these – Qtr1 Med Wage, Qtr2 Med Wage, Qtr3 Med Wage, and Qtr4 Med Wage. Double-click on each one so they are all included in the selection fields.

What we want is to list every employee that has some quarterly Medicare wages. Set the field logic from the default of “Between” to “<> Zero” for each field.

We also want to list the employee if they have activity in any of our selected quarters, not just if they have activity in all four, which would be the default behavior of the query. To do this, click the check box at the bottom of the dialog box called “Enable ‘Or’ Logic (Advanced Option).” On each selection field where it shows “And”, change it to “Or.” When complete, click .

Your selection criteria screen should look like this:

SMB Query Screen

Run the query without changing any of the selection criteria defaults and you will get a list of employees that have been active in the current payroll year.

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law