Time to Start Preparing for Year End!

It may not yet be Thanksgiving, but it’s not too early to start preparing for W-2s and 1099s that must be filed in January 2015.

Vendor Payments and 1099s

Most construction businesses will be required to report payments for services totaling more than $600 per year to recipients that are not specifically exempted from such reporting.  Exempted recipients include corporations (other than professional services corporations like doctors and lawyers), governmental agencies, non-profits, banks, and insurance carriers.  Individuals, sole proprietorships, partnerships, and limited liability companies are not exempt from 1099 reporting. Payments for merchandise (but not parts installed as part of a service provided), certain expense reimbursements to employees, and loan principal repayments do not need to be reported on a 1099.

There are a number of steps that you can take to ease your 1099 processing before the end of the year.

• Request a form W-9 from all vendors paid this year to ensure that you have proper names, addresses and Taxpayer ID numbers for vendors. The form also will provide the information needed to determine if a vendor is an entity exempt from 1099 reporting.  The current W-9 form can be downloaded from http://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/fw9.pdf.
• Review all vendors to ensure that they reflect the correct 1099 Type and if they are designated to receive a 1099 with types 1-Misc, 2-Rent, 3-Sole Proprietor, or 4-Interest, make sure you have the correct Name, Address and Taxpayer ID#. If a vendor is type 5-No 1099, it can’t hurt to have a valid Taxpayer ID#, but you are generally not required to collect one.
• There is no excuse for having a vendor with a 1099 Type of 0-Undetermined unless you have never paid the vendor!
• Review report 4-1-1-61 Vendor 1099 report to find problems or missing data.
• If you have questions about what payments are included in the 1099 balances, run report 4-1-5-61 Vendor 1099 Payments to see the details.
• If your Sage 100 Contractor information is incomplete for the calendar year (for instance you implemented during the year, you may need to adjust your data for payments made outside of Sage 100 Contractor.  Contact your friendly Sage Certified Consultant for more information about this special situation.

I strongly recommend that users not order 1099 forms or plan on in-house printing and mailing of 1099s to recipients and government agencies.  This tends to be more expensive than using the embedded Aatrix E-File service. Yes, there is a cost per recipient, but when one factors in the cost of acquiring the forms and envelopes, printing the forms, stuffing envelopes, affixing postage, and mailing the forms, the benefits of using the Aatrix E-File service become obvious.

Payroll and W-2s

If you prepare your payroll in house and will have to distribute W-2s to the governments and your employees, there are a few steps you can do to ease the process before the end of the year.

• Review all 5-2-1 Employee records for accuracy of employee names, social security numbers and addresses. 
• Be aware of any employees that may have received third party sick pay from a workers compensation insurer or a disability insurance provider and ensure that all reported third party sick pay data has been properly recorded in your payroll records.
• Run 5-3-7 Payroll Audit regularly and ensure that all audit errors are corrected.
• Review with your outside tax accountant whether any items of additional compensation must be added to employees’ total compensation, such as the cost of “excess” employee life insurance, the value of personal use of company owned vehicles, certain benefits provided to company owners, etc.  Such additional compensation can be properly reflected in your payroll records, but care should be taken to quantify the amounts and record them properly.

I strongly recommend that users not order W-2 forms or plan on printing and mailing W-2s to employees and government agencies.  This tends to be more expensive than using the embedded Aatrix E-File service. Yes, there is a cost per employee, but when one factors in the cost of acquiring the forms and envelopes, printing the forms, stuffing envelopes, affixing postage, and mailing the forms, the benefits of using the Aatrix E-File service become obvious.

Current Version of Sage 100 Contractor

The latest and greatest version of Sage 100 Contractor at the time of this posting is version 19.4.58. We bring you this as a public service, so that you may keep your program up to date and take advantage of the most recent features and functions.

Archiving Fiscal Year Data and Purging Old Jobs

When Sage announced the Multiple Fiscal Year General Ledger capability in the release of Version 19, most clients were truly excited, as they no longer needed to archive off the ending fiscal year data before entering transactions for the new fiscal year.  Every year end I would get numerous calls from clients worried about how they were going to archive off the old fiscal year before they were ready, yet they had transactions to record for the new fiscal year.  Earlier versions of the program had a great facility for continuing to record data for most prior year transactions (period 0 postings), but there were challenges with operator errors and some types of transactions were not period 0 friendly. Thus, the Multiple Fiscal Year General Ledger capability of Version 19 was an exciting new feature!

It seems that most clients that upgraded to Version 19 are still working with two fiscal years in their general ledger.  While there is no requirement to archive off fiscal year data, and more than two fiscal years can coexist in the general ledger, eventually users will experience some processing speed issues. If you have completed all accounting for your earliest fiscal year in your general ledger, I recommend that you consider archiving that fiscal year, taking it out of the current general ledger.  What do I mean by having completed all accounting for your earliest fiscal year?  Generally, you will have received and entered any year end adjusting entries that your outside accountant may have provided and you or your outside accountant will have compared your adjusted trial balance as of the end of the fiscal year to the accountant’s published tax returns or financial statements and determined that everything is in agreement.  If that has been done, you can archive your fiscal year accounting data with confidence!

Users may also use this process to purge jobs and their related data from the current company.  Jobs must be marked with a status of Closed or Refused, and must not have any open accounts receivable or accounts payable invoices.  Users may also purge old Service Receivable records with a status of Paid or Completed and Closed Purchase Orders not tied to Jobs as part of the archiving process.

Archiving a fiscal year is accomplished through Menu 1-6 > Archive Fiscal Year 20xx.  The process is well automated and practically runs itself.  If you are uncertain, consider printing, reading and following the Year End Checklist, a 20 page document that can be found in the Home & Resources > Product Documentation menu.  Backup your data before you get started, just in case something appears to be a problem.  If you are still uncertain, call your favorite Sage 100 Contractor Certified Consultant to give you a hand.

Current Version of Sage 100 Contractor

The latest and greatest version of Sage 100 Contractor at the time of this posting is version 19.4.52. We bring you this as a public service, so that you may keep your program up to date and take advantage of the most recent features and functions.

Reports – Windows into Your Business

Sage 100 Contractor comes, right out of the box, with nearly 1,200 system reports, yet some of our most frequent questions are about tweaking or customizing reports!  Most of the system reports were written with the report writer module that comes with the program, but some of the more complex reports rely on special programming to collect data or control the appearance of the report.  Most of report questions seem to be about these complex reports, ranging from adding or deleting data to changing the report selection criteria to rearranging how the data appears on the page.  Too often, we have to inform the client that the complex report they want to have modified cannot be changed because of the special programming in the report.  The only way to determine if a report is locked and cannot be modified is by looking for the Modify Report button on the report printing screen when the report is selected.  If the Modify Report button is present, the report can be modified.  If the Modify Report button is not present when the report is selected, that report is locked and cannot be modified.

If a report that has most of the data you want appears to be locked, don’t despair!  Depending on the changes sought and one’s tolerance for slower report generating speed, we may be able to create a new custom report that can collect and present the requested data.  Flesh out what your report should look like, perhaps in Excel, and send it to your Certified Consultant for an opinion as to whether it can be done with the Sage 100 Contractor report writer.

If the report cannot be generated with the included report writer, we have had great success using a third party reporting program to create quite complex reports that can solve almost any reporting problem.  If the data is available in Sage 100 Contractor, we can extract the data and present it in a format that meets users’ needs, usually at a very reasonable cost.

Consider also the ability to export system and custom reports from Sage 100 Contractor into Excel, where data can be added or removed and formats can be tweaked to meet one-time requests.  This is not an ideal solution for reports that may be needed regularly, but for random requests, this can be a viable and affordable option.

Save Time with Project Work Center

So often, when working with a client to resolve a problem with one of their projects, I’ll jump to menu 6-12 Project Work Center and plug in the job number.  The client then stops me to ask what I’m doing. I realize that I have another opportunity to train users about the usefulness of the Project Work Center!

Project Work Center was designed with project managers in mind, bringing all areas of the program preloaded with the job number, into one central work area.  The best part of the project work center is that one gets a much more comprehensive view of the data related to a project.  If you look at Purchase Orders, your first screen is a complete list of all the purchase orders for the project, from which you can select and drill down into each record.  If you look at Subcontracts or Change Orders, in each case, you start with a complete list of all that data for the project and you can drill down from there!  Open Receivable Invoices/Credits and you see all receivable invoices related to the job.  Open Payable Invoices and you see all open payable invoices for the job.  Any report related to a specific job is preloaded with the job number to ease the process.  The right side of the project work center loads with a hot list of flagged items related to the project and summarized data about the project.  The menu structure on the left side can be customized to trim out menu items that are not used by a particular user.

Project Work Center, originally created for project managers, can be an invaluable tool when performing Job Autopsies, or whenever anyone needs to deal with one project at a time.

Call Mathieson Consulting for more information and training.

What’s New in Version 19.3?

Yes, the current version of Sage 100 Contractor – 2014 is version 19.3!  Its availability was announced in mid-June by email.  There were several enhancements in this version, but a few that are particularly worth noting are:

Integration with Sage Payment Solutions - For users that process credit card payments from customers, the program now connects with Sage Payment Solutions to provide seamless processing of credit card payments from customers with a cost-effective merchant card service provider. Sage Payment Solutions can also enhance collections by generating ACH virtual check payments.  All customer data is safely stored in compliance with the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) – an important necessity.

Expanded State Certified Payroll Reports - For users that must supply certified payroll reports to State Labor Departments, the program’s integration with Aatrix now prepares and, where available, e-files state certified payroll reports in all 49 states that have their own reporting requirement. 

Drag and Drop Files and Shortcuts on Your Sage 100 Contractor Desktop - I think this is an underappreciated enhancement that can benefit most users.  Are you tired of having to jump out of Sage 100 Contractor to locate and open a spreadsheet, document or folder while working in the program? Now users can drag and drop those files and shortcuts right onto your Sage 100 Contractor desktop and ease that process. 

The program help system and your favorite Certified Consultant are available for your assistance with these new features.