June 2009 - Issue 11

Dear InterMicro Clients,

We will be attending our annual Open Systems conference June 8-12^th and our office will be partially staffed during this week.  If we aren’t able to answer your call right away, please know that we will be checking voicemail and e-mail regularly and will do everything we can to resolve your issue in a timely manner.

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InterMicro Welcomes Emily Bruce 

We are pleased to welcome Emily Bruce to the InterMicro family. Emily Bruce grew up in Atlanta, GA. She went to college at Bob Jones University where she studied Computer Science and Business. After graduating she worked for about three years with PSA Consulting in Greenville, SC designing and writing custom business applications. In her free time she enjoys reading, word puzzles, and hanging out with friends. 

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Managing Summer Vacation Issues 

Summer vacations tend to bring along their own issues for the accounting department. Some employees receive their vacation check in advance, some employees do not take their vacations and just receive an ‘extra’ check. Hourly employee’s vs salaried employees also create issues sometimes. Then there is the matter of keeping up with the vacation hours the employee has earned and taken. 

Here are some helpful hints to get you through this vacation season.  

Hourly employees can receive two checks in the same Payroll run by entering their regular hours as sequence 0 and entering the vacation hours as sequence 1(or any other sequence number). 

Salaried employees can receive two checks by adding a manual check for this salaried employee after you have calculated checks. 

To process a whole Payroll run of checks that you do not want any deductions taken from (only taxes) use the Pay Code (Pd Code) of 6 when calculating checks. 

To process vacation checks that will only have one deduction when there are several scheduled deductions set up for the employee enter the hours and calculate as you normally do. Go into Manual checks after calculating and select the check whose deductions you want to change. On the Deduction screen zero out the deductions. In OSAS re-calculate the check, in TRAVERSE select YES to re-calculate the check when you select NEXT. 

To process a few hours of vacation for a Salaried employee make sure the EARNING TYPE is set to REPLACE. Enter the vacation hours for this Salaried employee in Daily Work, Transactions using the EARNING CODE for vacation. When Time Tickets are posted and checks are calculated the vacation hours entered will replace the employee’s regular hours with the number of vacation hours entered. If you also want the related payroll dollars calculated you must either enter an hourly rate in the employee’s master file or enter the rate when you are entering time tickets. 

To add a week’s vacation to a regular check for an hourly employee simply enter the regular hours and then enter the vacation hours. Process the check as usual. You may want to adjust the taxes that are being withheld from this larger than usual check enter Manual checks after you have calculated checks and call up the check and make changes to the Federal and/or State Withholdings. 

To keep up with the vacation hours an employee has if you are not using the automatic accruals you can simply enter the total vacation hours that the employee has through Leave Adjustments. As you enter vacation hours in Daily Work, Transactions, the vacation hours entered here will be deducted from the hours in the employee’s file. Running the Detail Leave Report in OSAS will give you hours earned and taken by month or quarter. Running the Sick Leave & Vacation Report in TRAVERSE will give you this information by dates entered from and thru.

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Bank Account Transfers by Check           

In Bank Reconciliation when you call or go up on your bank’s website to transfer money from one bank account to another you normally then go into Bank Reconciliation and do a TRANSFER.        

What happens when you actually write a check to transfer funds? The bank you are writing the check out of will have a disbursement but if you use the receiving bank GL account number in entering the Accounts Payable entry you will not have a deposit to select in the receiving bank account’s reconciliation.

To accomplish getting both the disbursement and the deposit into the respective accounts use a ‘flow through’ GL account as your ‘expense’ account in the AP entry. Then enter the DEPOSIT in Bank Rec to the receiving bank and use this same ‘flow through’ account. This account will net to zero and you will have the check and the deposit in the banks. 

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Fiscal Year End 06/30/09           

Is June 30 your fiscal year end? If so there are several things you need to remember. 

Make sure all Updates to Current year have been performed from your last fiscal year.

Post Accounts Payable or Purchase Order, Daily Work, Transactions to clear out the year assigned to that batch when it was created. If the batch was set to current year before you create the new GL year then it will post to the most current GL year and not the old year that you wanted.  

Create the new General Ledger year as soon as possible at year end so you can be working out of both years at the same time. 

Perform year end maintenance in all other applications as quickly as possible after creating the new year in General Ledger. When processing in each application you are asked whether the transactions you are entering get posted to this year or last year. 

Update the current year in General Ledger each time you post to the master in the old year. This will bring forward any changes to the beginning balances for the Balance Sheet accounts. Updating current year is performed in the old year. No one else may be in the software when you update. 

Version 7.52 comes with Accounts Payable/Purchase Order batches that will post to different years. If you are not on version 7.52 remember that you must keep each year’s transactions batch separate. 

Do NOT perform year end in Payroll, only Quarter End.

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Customer Deposits           

When a customer is requested to pay a deposit there are several ways to account for the deposit.           

You can enter the deposit in Cash Receipts and put it on the customer’s account. This however does not show this deposit as a liability it lowers the value of the Accounts Receivable Open Invoices. When the customer is invoiced this deposit must then be split and reapplied to the invoice. There is no way to show the deposit applied on the invoice.           

A second way is to enter the Cash Receipt without a customer ID. Use the Customer Deposit GL Liability account to apply the deposit to and use the customer id as the invoice number.           

Set up a method of payment that is a write off and uses this customer deposit GL account number. When the customer is invoiced apply this method of payment to the invoice to reduce amount owed. 

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Credit Card Receipts           

The use of credit cards by employees can sometimes get out of hand. Often nothing is entered during the month and only at the time the credit card bill arrives are any expenses entered.            

These credit card expenses can be large dollar amounts and may affect business decisions during the month.           

There is no reason you cant enter these receipts as they are turned in by your employees.            

If you do enter them during the month enter them in such a way that it is easy to run the Open Invoice Report and match the entered receipts to the statement.           

A date format for an invoice number can assist not only in matching up but also later on when you are running reports out of Accounts Payable Detail History.           

For example if you have a receipt dated June 09, 2009 you would use the invoice number 20090609 to indicate this date.            

When the Open Invoice Report is run for the Credit Card Vendor these invoices will line up in date order as your statement is.           

If your need is to run credit card receipts by the employee who purchased then you might consider using the employee’s initials in front of the date formatted invoice number. Just be consistent in your invoice numbering so months and years from now you can run reports from Detail History. 

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GL Allocations           

Do you have certain purchases that you always split up amongst several General Ledger accounts based upon percentages?          

If you do you can set these up as allocations and not have to split out and calculate the amount that goes to each account.           

In Set up and Maintenance, Allocations enter the main GL account that you will use when entering invoices or transactions. Next enter each GL account number and percentage of expense that you want to go to that account number.            

When applications are posted to the General Ledger you will see when you go to post that there are allocations to be posted. When posted the main account number will be reversed from the original entry and dispersed to the other accounts found in allocations based upon the percentages that were entered.

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