S100C: More Updates

December and January were a whirlwind of Sage 100 Contractor activity! Between the payroll closes, audit errors and repairs, preparing quarterly payroll reports, W-2s and 1099’s, and gathering info to get to the CPA, several IMPORTANT themes have emerged, and we wanted to get them in front of you.

Job Cost Reconciliation to Direct Expenses – Most direct costs are generated from screens that require job costing when you choose a direct expense account. Some clients create additional cost records for company-owned equipment if they don’t have the Equipment module but use the T&M Billing module for billing. These entries are outside the accounting entries.

For you ‘old timers,’ you might remember that when we used to close the year, we ran the Job Cost Audit. It’s actually still a ‘thing’ but it’s available as a report. In the 6-3 screen, choose the printer and report 41 or 42 to compare job costs to posting period entries as part of a reconciliation. 

Payroll Audit – We noticed quite a few of you are not running the 5-3-7 payroll audit at the end of each payroll. That might be OK, but it turns out some of you aren’t running it before preparing the quarterly reports either, and that’s not OK! And a few people didn’t run it before generating W-2s which is definitely a no-no.

If you don’t want to run the payroll audit weekly – and some of you with a large number of payroll records, we understand – at least run it during the monthly close process, and definitely run it before creating any quarterly payroll reports. Even if you ran the audit to close the payroll at the end of the year, run the audit before generating the W-2s and final quarterly reports. Better to be safe than sorry, and in one case, someone made an unexpected rate change after the close.

Audit Errors – Whether it’s the 1-6 Monthly Close Audit, or the 5-3-7 Payroll Audit, don’t ignore those Audit Errors! We’re not very happy that Sage allows you to roll the Posting Period forward each month when there are Fiscal Audit errors. We understand that the old way, you were stuck and had a mini ‘emergency’ on your hand, but the result is that many of the calls we took in early January were clients with Audit Errors from the 1-6 screen that had not been addressed when they were originally discovered months ago, and now became an emergency because they couldn’t roll into the new year. Same thing with payroll audit errors – way easier to address them when they first come up than to try to figure them out when we’re trying to file the tax returns by the due dates!

If you have an audit error, from 1-6 or 5-3-7, give us a call, and let’s get it handled right away when we have the flexibility to schedule. – CMW