Maple Business Software Consulting, LLC.

59113 Timber Trail

Goshen, IN 46528-8616

Phone 574-312-8056  

School is out and summer vacations are beginning. Here are some reminders on how to process various types of vacation pay and other situations you will encounter as you process vacation checks:

When entering hours in Transactions first enter the nor-mal pay cycle hours. Next change the Sequence code to 1 and enter the VAC hours. Each different sequence code will produce a separate paycheck.

Process all Daily Work transactions and post. Calculate checks to include salaried employees. Once calculated enter Manual Checks and select the tab ‘checks’, select NEW button. Enter VAC hours for the salaried employee. Click Next. This will add a second check for this salaried employee.

Using Calculate Checks or Manual Checks process the payroll using a Pay Code of 6. Pay codes relate to each week within a month and since there are not 6 weeks in a month the system assumes you want no deductions taken. All taxes are calculated and withheld. This will process all checks within this check run the same way.

Enter the hours through time ticket entry and post or add the check through manual checks. When calculated select this particular check and sequence. Edit the deductions that you wish to change, recalculate the check. This will correct any taxable wages involving tax deferred deductions and it will set any other non-tax deferred deductions to what you wanted them to be.

Make sure the earning type in the earning code VAC is set to an earning type that will REPLACE hours entered in Daily Work. These vacation hours, whether one day or the whole week will then replace the salaried hours the person would have had calculated when answering YES to include salaried employees. Note that it will show the SAL as negative and the VAC as positive.

The only issue here is that the employee will be taxed on the higher amount of the check. After calculating you can manually adjust this check to have the taxes you wish to withhold.

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The third annual Customer Excellence Conference will be here before you know it.

Two days and three evenings of concentrated learning, networking and problem solving await you.

Meet with other users of the software and share your experiences. Meet with the OSI staff and attend breakouts as well as spend time in the lab with one on one consultation for those questions you have brought with you.

Sign up on the website at www.osas.com.

June 11-13 is the annual Open Systems Partner Conference. We will be attending this conference with the goal of networking and education.

Breakouts will be held on the new products that have recently been released such as Banking and the Enhanced Payroll application for tax reporting.

We will also be working with the newly released OSAS 7.5 version as well as seeing glimpses of the new Traverse Version 11 which is a technology release that will move Traverse from Access to .net.

Look for next month’s newsletter to see what the future holds for your accounting needs.

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OSAS Tips & Tricks - Reprinting Forms

Murphy’s law states that if you walk away from your printer while printing checks or forms they WILL jam. It happens to all of us and especially seems to happen when you are printing a large number of forms. You can just void all of the checks or invoices and start the print cycle all over again as if you had never run them before, OR you can use the restart function found on the print checks or invoice menu.

When using the restart function you are prompted to enter the last good check or invoice number that printed. Also enter the form number that you will begin with in the ‘first invoice or check number’ field. The printing will then pick up with the next check or invoice after the last good form number and will begin numbering the rest of the checks or invoices with the number you entered in the ‘first’ check or invoice number field.

Using this reprint function can salvage your check or invoice run especially when most of the checks or invoices had already been printed before the jam.

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If June is your fiscal year end you will want to create the new year in General Ledger as quickly as you can. This will allow you to continue posting applications in the old year as well as begin work in the new year.

Since much of Traverse is ‘date driven’ your Accounts Payable and Accounts Receivable invoices will post to the proper year depending on the date that you have processed them as.

Physical Inventory should be processed as quickly as possible so that your valuation at year end is exact.

Year end is a good time to purge your Open Invoice Files. This is done through Periodic Processing. Purging Paid Invoices does not remove any detail or summary history, only paid invoices.

Once you have completed entering data into each application for the old year you can then use System Manager to close that application in last year so that no additional data can be posted to that period.

Remember there is no yea- end for Payroll or Bank Reconciliation.

Also remember to update current year each time you post to the master in the old year.

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How often does this hap-pen? The customer purchases and is charged sales tax. At payment they send the Exemption certificate for the sale.

In order to keep your tax-able, non-taxable and sales tax amounts correct in your tax reporting files you must enter a credit memo to the customer that is taxable and then re-issue the invoice as non-taxable.

If just you set up a method of payment to remove the sales tax it will properly go to the Sales tax GL account number you use but it will not update the Tax Reporting Files found in System or Resource Manager and you will end up overpaying your sales tax.

For Sales tax write off’s always issue credit memo’s and reissue the invoice.

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The standard mileage rate for business use of a car during 2008 is 50.5 cents per mile.

When reimbursing an employee for use of their personal auto you can simply run a check through Accounts Payable to reimburse the employee. Or, you can set up an earning code within payroll and exclude it from all taxes and actually add the amount to the employee’s paycheck each payroll run. At year end only taxable wages appear on the W2 and since this is not taxable it will not add to the employees wages.

If the opposite is true and the employee is using a business owned vehicle that employee must re-port and be taxed for their personal use of this vehicle.

The entire year can be calculated at year end and the employee taxed all at once, or to spread the tax burden for the employee over the year, you can set up an earning code for the auto use and add an amount each week to the employee’s paycheck.

Set up an earning code (CAR) as a fringe benefit, earning type F (ADD to Salaried Pay) do not include this in NET PAY. Next either set up a recurring entry for the amount you want to add to each Payroll run, or enter the amount you want to add to each payroll run individually in Transactions.

Each payroll run the employee’s taxable wages will be increased by this CAR amount. The taxes will be calculated but this taxable amount will not be included in the employee’s net pay.

To have this taxable amount appear in box 14 of the W2 with the description you determine simply enter the W2 box in the earning code that you want this to appear in and enter the description you want to appear.

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