If you have been a MAS customer with Payroll for many years, I’m sure at some point one of you have made the gut-wrenching mistake of closing the quarter BEFORE running your Electronic Reporting for 941 and SUTA. Two separate MAS clients have called in the past two days that have fallen prey to this unfortunate occurrence. For those of you that have not run into this, let me fill you in – there is no turning back! Once you run the Period End Process for Payroll at the end of the quarter, there is no way to extract the data for the previous quarter in Electronic Reporting. The ONLY way this can be done is to restore the company from a backup. So as the end of the quarter has passed and we are all about to do our period processing to run our first payrolls of April 2011, remember to save a copy of your live company in order to run and reconcile your 1^st Quarter Electronic Reporting before moving on with 2^nd Quarter.

Even if you do not use Electronic Reporting, there is a very important update that is needed BEFORE you do the Period End Processing for March. Quarterly 941 Printing has been updated for the 2012 IRS changes to the 941 Form (Rev. January 2012). This update has text and line number changes to the Report Formats, ‘Entire Form’ ‘Pre-Printed’ and ‘Worksheet’. On page 2 of the 941 the boxes to enter the state abbreviation for where you make you deposits have been removed. The font size for the “Entire Form” and the “Pre-Printed Form” has been changed to 10 and also commas have been removed from numeric printing. On the Quarterly 941 Printing window the check box Tax Deposits Made in Multiple States and entry field State Where Tax Deposits Were Made have been removed. The IRS has not made any changes to the Schedule B for 2012.

Note: The “Pre-printed Form” format has been designed based on the downloaded 941.pdf, from the IRS website. If you use the “Pre-printed Form” format the alignment may need to be adjusted or the form may need to be modified.

If you are in need of the 941 form update, please contact us to take care of this for you before printing your forms for submission or they will be rejected from the IRS.

I cannot stress enough how important it is to MAKE A COPY of your live company to create a backup for the prior quarter and at year end. Getting IT or your partner involved to restore from a nightly backup of your files can be a very costly result of not doing so.

-Kim Caron
Software Consultant