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It’s not too soon to begin
planning to attend this
year’s annual OSAS and
TRAVERSE Customer Excellence
Conference being held
September 22-23.
The agenda will include two
days of breakout sessions
with several classes to
choose from for each
session. The venue is
South Point Casino in Las
Vegas.
Check
www.osas.com for
additional details. Start
planning and budgeting now
so you can attend.
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New tax benefits are
now available to employers hiring workers who were
previously unemployed or only working part time.
These provisions are part of the Hiring Incentives
to Restore Employment (HIRE) Act enacted into law on
3/18/2010.
Employers who hire unemployed workers this year
(after Feb. 3, 2010 and before Jan. 1, 2011) may
qualify for a 6.2-percent payroll tax incentive, in
effect exempting them from their share of Social
Security taxes on wages paid to these workers after
March 18, 2010. This reduced tax withholding will
have no effect on the employee's future Social
Security benefits, and employers would still need to
withhold the employee's 6.2-percent share of Social
Security taxes, as well as income taxes. The
employer and employee's shares of Medicare taxes
would also still apply to these wages.
Form 941, Employer's Quarterly Federal Tax Return,
will be revised for second quarter filings. Any
first quarter credit amounts would be treated as a
payment for the second quarter and would need to be
claimed on the second quarter Form 941 filing. In
addition:
--The 2010 Form W-2 will have a box 12, code "CC"
added for reporting HIRE Act exempt wages and tips
for qualified employees.
-- Form W-3 also will have a line added.
-- The first quarter exempt amounts are to be
treated as a payment made on the first day of the
second quarter on the revised Form 941, just like
the current COBRA subsidy tax credit.
-- For the following quarters, employers will report
total amounts on the first page of Form 941, and
reduce the liability on Schedule B, Form 941, by the
amount of the tax reduction.
Qualified employees will need to complete a Form
W-11. The form is to confirm that the new hire is a
qualified employee under the HIRE Act. Employers
cannot claim HIRE Act (Pub. L. No. 111-147)
benefits, including a payroll tax exemption or a
new-hire retention credit, unless the employee
completes and signs the affidavit or similar
statement. The form is to be kept on file by the
employer.
A draft of the 941 and the W-11 are available on the
IRS website.
http://www.irs.gov/businesses/small/article/0,,id=220745,00.html?portlet=7
What you can do now
As we await additional information from the
Government our suggestion eligible employees is to:
1.) Keep tax calculations unchanged in
the software.
2.) From the W-11's you have on file
establish a list of employees who qualify for the
credit.
3.) At the end of every quarter, go
thru those employees and see how much employer OASDI
was paid.
4.) The dollar amount that the
accounting system calculated would be the amount you
could claim as credit on your Q2 941 (and subsequent
941s)
5.) Make a manual adjustment to GL when
you take this credit.
We strongly recommend that you review the
instructions and qualifications from the IRS.
www.irs.gov
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Inventory
Item Setup
When setting up Inventory items the thing to
keep in mind is how you want to ‘mine’ the
information for these items as they are
purchased and sold.
Knowing what fields are stored in history as
well as what fields give you ‘sorts’ or
‘print by’s’ when generating reports will
greatly assist you in setting up Inventory
Items.
· Item type is ‘nonserialized’ for
all standard items you are keeping up with
quantities for. Item type ‘serialized’ is
for those items that have serial numbers
tied to them. Item type ‘service’ items can
be sold but they can not be purchased. There
is no cost associated with service items.
· Sales
Category identifies the market you sell
groups of items to and helps you analyze
sales. The Sales Category Codes are used to
sort historical information generated in
Accounts Receivable.
· Product Lines identify a larger
category than the item fits in. For example
if you sell 50 different types of brooms you
would assign the same Product Line to all of
them. Many reports within the Inventory
application allow you to specify product
line. Lookups can be by Product Lines.
Product Lines can also be used when setting
up promotional pricing.
· Locations can be set to represent
warehouses where the items are stored, or
separate areas of the same warehouse. They
can also represent Raw Materials vs Finished
Goods. Items can quickly be moved from
Location to Location as the items move
through your process or line. Additional
costs can be added during each Location
move. Most any report in any application
that references Inventory items allows you
to ‘mine’ your data by Location. Keeping
this in mind may allow you additional
reporting capabilities.
· Account Codes define the General
Ledger Accounts that will be posted to when
this item is Purchased, Sold, Counted,
Adjusted, or Moved. Account Codes are
assigned to an item within a Location. This
allows for the same item to post to
different General Ledger Accounts from
within different Locations.
· User Defined Fields can be set up
for anything about an item that you need to
define for each item. First define the User
Field with a description and select whether
or not it is sorted or required. Set up
values that can be used within the specific
User Defined Field that you set up. For
example a User Defined Field could be set up
for Color. Next you would set up all the
various colors the items could be. Inventory
Movement, Item Sales, Price, Valuation,
Variance, and Transaction Reports can be run
by specific colors. User Defined Fields are
meant to be specific to your needs.
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Workstation Date Change
When entering data into past periods it’s
sometimes easier to just change your
workstation date to the last day of the
month. Having the workstation date on the
date/month/period you are working in can
keep you from accidentally entering an
incorrect date or period.
Something to consider though is that all the
General Ledger postings will reflect both
the Transaction date and the Post date as
the same date.
If you do not change the workstation date
and enter transactions then the Post Date
will reflect the ACTUAL date the entries
were made and the Transaction Date will
reflect the day/month/period you are
entering.
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Requested Ship Date
Both Sales Order and Purchase Order have a
‘Requested Ship Date’ Field for each line
item on the invoice or order.
When entering your line items in either
Sales or Purchase Order enter the requested
ship date on each line of the
order.
The Purchase Order Open Order Report allows
you to selected Requested Ship Dates From
and Thru so you can report on Open Orders
that fall within that date
range.
The Sales Order Open Order Report allows you
to ‘Sort By’ the Requested Ship
Dates.
Running reports that show when goods will be
received or when goods are needed to ship to
customers can certainly assist you with
scheduling for both incoming and outgoing
goods.
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Purging Open Invoices
Most of us have completed our 2009 year end
tax reporting. With that said it is now time
for a little clean up.
The Open Invoice File in both Accounts
Receivable and Accounts Payable actually
contain all invoices ever entered, whether
paid or not, if you have not purged your
Paid Invoices recently.
The purpose of keeping these Paid Invoices
in the Open Invoice File is so that Aged
Trial Balances can be run for past periods.
This is very handy when you have gone
several months past year end and still need
to go back and run Aged Trial Reports that
match your General Ledger back at year
end.
But, left to accumulate for years and years
the Open Invoice File with all the Paid
invoices can slow down your Prepare Payments
function as well as month end
processing.
Purging ONLY Paid Invoices will remove those
Paid invoices only, leaving all Detail and
Summary History intact. Performing this
purge when year end is complete will clean
up this file, speed up your processing and
reduce the size of this ever growing file.
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Summary Histories
Within the Inquiry Menu of Accounts Payable,
Accounts Receivable, and Inventory you will
find Summary History.
This allows you to quickly see what you have
spent, what your customer has spent, and
what has been purchased and sold by
Inventory Item.
Simply enter the Vendor, Customer or Item ID
and the year you wish to look at. By period
within that year the total dollar amount
transacted during each period will appear.
This gives you a very quick and concise look
at a particular Vendor, Customer or Item.
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|
Save Green, while going GREEN in
TRAVERSE |
TRAVERSE |
TRAVERSE helps you stay environmentally
friendly and save you money by eliminating
paper, postage, and gas. Some GREEN
feature found in TRAVERSE Version 11 are:
· Print
posting logs directly to PDF
· Send
invoices electronically - no more stamps or
paper
· Customer
and Vendor alerts via email - be alerted of
critical information.
· Document
management - electronic archiving of key
data
· Drilldown
- obtain account information directly from
GL financial statement
· Send
reports directly to a file - no need to
print unless you choose to
· Collect
and make payments with ACH - no more
checks!
· Deposit
checks directly into employee accounts
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| Reversing
un-posted General Ledger
Transactions |
TRAVERSE |
Once transactions are posted from other
applications, or ‘written’ when manually
entered into General Ledger Transactions
they reside within EDIT TRANSACTIONS until
they are “posted to the
master”.
When you enter Edit Transactions you are
only viewing the last ‘post’ of transactions
that was made. To see all of the ‘un-posted
transactions’ clear the Post Run From and
Thru and select the ‘refresh’ button. This
will bring in all the rest of the
transactions that are un-posted to the
master.
It is generally not advised to edit
transactions as this will not leave an audit
trail. If something has been edited within
the ‘edit transactions’ and the General
Journal is run by ‘post run’ the data that
you will view is the ‘edited’ data for that
post run, not the original post.
The safe way to correct entries when they
are in ‘edit’ is to highlight each entry
that is in-correct and press the button in
the upper left hand corner that has a
circular arrow in it. This will reverse the
entry that you selected and place it out in
Transactions waiting to be ‘written’. Do
this to all debit and credit sides of the
entry. When written these will reverse the
original incorrect entry. Now you can make
manual entries to correct the information.
Remember though this is only correcting the
General Ledger. Information posted to other
applications remains as originally posted.
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