FUTA Discrepancy?

[drcfisher]

I manually enter each payroll period, including all withholding, matching, FUTA, etc., into Quickbooks for each pay period. I always run a PayWindow and Quickbooks payroll liabilities report each pay period just to make sure they match and no manual entry errors were made. Today, they differed by $1.05 (Quickbooks showed I owed a $1.05 more than PayWindow). I tracked this down to the very last payroll check (I wrote today). It turned about to be FUTA. PayWindow said $1.05 was owed for FUTA, which was entered into QB. This was the discrepancy. However, everything was entered correctly. Yet, PayWindow is for some reason not counting this $1.05 in YTD total. How can this be? Moreover, as of today, I am many thousands and thousands of dollars over the FUTA Wage Base (YTD). Should PayWindow not have calculated FUTA this pay period to start with? Is this a PayWindow error?

Thanks in advance,

Chris

[Paul Mayer]

FUTA is on the taxable income, my guess is that one of your employees broke the threshold of the $7,000 wage limit.

[drcfisher]

Thanks for the response.

Yes, I did break past the FUTA threshold, which I mentioned in my original post. However, this does not explain the discrepancy I cited. PayWindow, on the one hand, said $1.05 FUTA is due for this payroll period, and listed it in employer paid taxes due for this period, but then did not include it in the YTD total. If nothing is due, shouldn't there be a $0.00 for this payroll period, instead of $1.05, which is creating the discrepancy between QB and PayWindow?

Thanks again.

[Paul Mayer]

Did you possibly start using PayWindow recently? You would have had to use PayWindow from January 1st in order for the program to have the payroll history in order to know when the cutoffs are happening. Not one of our 7,000 plus users have ever had a problem with the calculations and wage limits unless they did not put in the payroll history *before* paying employees or having a typo when entering the history manually.

[drcfisher]

Sorry for the delayed response. Busy week.

I am a relatively new company. The first payroll period was Jan. 15 - 31, 2012. So PayWindow is completely up-to-date (historically) so I seriously doubt that play into this.

I have a new twist for you. I was thinking I might send you a screenshot of what I see where PayWindow clearly makes a mistake in calculating FUTA. I left the first print out at work so I just reran the report to print it to PDF - and guess what - it removed the errant $1.05 from the FUTA total for this pay period. Now everything is correct to the penny. I'll compare the this report other printed report with error tomorrow at work, but I am pretty sure I am right no here. I'd be happy to send you a copy of each report so you can see that I am not losing my mind.

There was an software update to the program I did before running today's payroll report. Could that have something to do with the apparent accurate (re)adjustment to FUTA?

[Paul Mayer]

FUTA is a flat percentage of the taxable wages. You can see the taxable wages in the report center under Tax Reports and then the Tax Liability Report Tab. Select the quarter that you want to see and it will show you the taxable wages. You can then do the math with a calculator to see that it matches what we have. We have over 7,000 users and if there was a problem we'd be flooded with emails and phone calls but we are not. Like I said, you can verify it with a calculator, QuickBooks may be set up incorrectly if you are getting a different result. The FUTA code in PayWindow is has not changed since the year 2000 and is correct.

It's possible that you set an exempt flag on a deduction that tells PayWindow that a deduction is non taxable? The only time FUTA has ever been wrong is user settings like that.

[drcfisher]

This has nothing to do with Quickbooks. I caught the error because I entered these manually into QB and upon further investigation then noticed the discrepancy in PayWindow. Whatever the reason, PayWindow calculated FUTA during one payroll period when it should not have. I have printed PayWindow reports that show this clearly, which you do not seem to be interested in. Nonetheless, this issue somehow resolved itself despite no changes to the employee file/settings on my part so I guess this discussion probably makes no difference now. But I do appreciate your responses.