W3 numbers

[TheBigZ]

So far this one has me stumped. All year long, my 941's for this client reflect identical wages, SS wages and Medicare wages for each and every quarter. For that matter, every report I ran for each quarter also showed the same state and local wages (subject to any adjustments I needed to make for out of state employees) as the fed wages, SS wages and Medicare wages. This company has no retirement plans or anything else that should cause any of the wages amounts to not be the same for each tax.
Yet when i ran the W3, the federal wages (W3 box 1) and local wages (W3 box 18) are different from the other wages. I also show an amount for Deferred Comp (W3 box 12a) that I also can't account for yet. So far, I'm at a loss to explain why the 941's would be different from the W3. Isn't it basically the exact same calculation, except for the date range that it covers?

I've backed up the client file, and am sending it to the support email. Maybe you can figure out what I did?

[Paul Mayer]

I received your database and you owe me an hour of detective work. :-)

You cannot enter any negative figures in any of the "pay" data entries. You had 8 negative data entries in the Bonus pay entry field. The totaled to $500.76 and that as a negative number doubles the taxable wages making it $1,001.62 which is exactly the difference on that W3 form from the other numbers.

It took me an hour as IO was searching for all sorts of errors that users had made in the past never dawning on me what the problem could be. This was so obscure, it didn't dawn on me until I exhausted everything we've ever seen before. That's when I started searching the raw data for the "-" symbol. After many clicks to find "Next", I deleted the social security numbers from the database and it became apparent immediately what the problem was caused by.

Thanks, that was a fun exercise to test my ability. :-)

[TheBigZ]

Well. That just makes me ask more questions.
First being the same question I had originally. Why don't the 941's reflect this same error? Again, it should be performing the same calculation, just with a date range for the whole calendar year, instead of a given quarter.
Second, if there's something I "cannot" do, then why doesn't the program trap for that and prevent me from doing it. By definition, I "can" do it. The scenario was this: The client faxed over their payroll, and we prepared it and delivered it to them. They handed out the checks, and better than half those checks were subsequently cashed by the employees. About that time it came to their attention that they somehow had given me the hours for 2 pay periods prior. It was obviously too late to recall & correct the checks. The decision was made to adjust on the next pay... some were owed time, others owed it back. Now, if you've ever prepared paychecks for the masses, you know that if I just changed their hours on the next pay, I would have gotten 2 dozen phone calls about how so&so says their paycheck was wrong. It needed to be adjusted on a separate line that they could SEE. So that's how that happened. Sometimes things have to be adjusted after the event has long since happened - crap happens.

I guess the only way I'm going to fix this is to go back to those pays and manually adjust the pays & force all the numbers to come out the same. That should easily take more than an hour, so let's call it even. ;)
But I still maintain that the program should not let me do something you intend me not to be allowed to do. But even more importantly than that, it's CLEARLY calculating the W3 numbers in a different manner than it is the 941 numbers. And that just seems like a bad idea to me. It just begs for something like this to happen. If I had a longer memory, I'd bring up that there used to be a time that we could actually edit the numbers before we printed W3's/W2's from within the program, without having to buy another program. That would make this more like a 20 second fix. Fortunately, I don't remember back that far. ;)

[Paul Mayer]

I'm just glad that the W3 "flagged" the problem you had. You are the first person in over 30 years of our payroll software to enter a negative payment. And once we release the next build, it will be the last as we are blocking the ability to enter a negative number in any of the pay entries and the tax entries so we do not have this problem again. But it always takes either a beta testers or a user to find a problem like that and not bad for 31 years of the same code.

As the designer and architect of our software, we never did have the ability to edit the W2 forms except in the WageFiler program we released a few years ago and dropped after two years when we found W2Express which was less costly and took no effort on our part to continually update and support saving our users money.

[TheBigZ]

I'm just glad that the W3 "flagged" the problem you had. You are the first person in over 30 years of our payroll software to enter a negative payment. And once we release the next build, it will be the last as we are blocking the ability to enter a negative number in any of the pay entries and the tax entries so we do not have this problem again. But it always takes either a beta testers or a user to find a problem like that and not bad for 31 years of the same code.

As the designer and architect of our software, we never did have the ability to edit the W2 forms except in the WageFiler program we released a few years ago and dropped after two years when we found W2Express which was less costly and took no effort on our part to continually update and support saving our users money.

If a program can be broken, I'll often be the one to do it. It's probably a function of stubbornness. If I need the program to do come up with a certain result, I'm going to find a way to make it do that... by trickery if necessary. Then of course there's my penchant for making mistakes! ;)

As for the editing, I clearly recall during the first couple years of using Pay Window, that there was a way (probably via the aforementioned trickery) that I was able to use one of the preview functions to change something I didn't like on the W2/W3 and print it the way I wanted it. Specifically, it was related to employees that lived in NJ & worked in PA, and I wasn't able to get the letters "NJ" to show up in the state box. I know I did it, you may not have intended it, but I found a way at the time. And somewhere along the way, that function disappeared. Perhaps it was more related to the form of the preview than Pay Window, but it was there. I recall that when I did the preview in question, the screen had some sort of grid background.
Anyway, I've spent hours trying to recreate it, and it's just not there... so let's move on.

Speaking of NJ/PA employee/resident mixes. I know there is a FAQ for setting up NJ taxes. Did you ever do one for the PA/NJ reciprocal agreement? If one works in PA but lives in NJ, they are subject to the PA employment taxes (unemployment etc) but only NJ income tax. And of course vice versa... working in NJ subject to FLI, SDI, etc etc but only PA income tax. That's a real pain in the caboose, and I'd love to be able to point my wife and employees to a FAQ so they don't have to keep asking me! Especially since I don't know that I've ever gotten it right myself. ;)

One 1096 related thing while I have you here. I realize that this is really cosmetic... as when the IRS scans these things, the scanner looks for black marks within a given red delineated area. But the little black X that is supposed to go in the 1099Misc box... there's really no way to get that X in that box without moving everything else out of it's box. Ideally, the EIN number (box 1) could stand to be about a quarter inch to the left, and that X would need to be slightly up & to the right by maybe three-sixteenths. That's with every other box on the 1096 lining up perfectly. Like I said, it's probably a low priority cosmetic thing. I just like stuff I present to clients to look nice & neat.

Oh, and the forums could really allow a ~little~ more time to type out posts before it kicks you for inactivity. I've gotten to the point that when I post, I highlight & copy what I've written because I've most likely been kicked for inactivity and will just have to log back in & paste it again anyway... like I did for this post. It's a given if I get interrupted at all mid-post.

[Paul Mayer]

I see, you were able to double click to open the Form Edit page and edit the W2's. That was definitely not a feature by design. We use a forms package called Fast Forms for Delphi and that was designed for the developers when designing them, not the end user to change them. :-) Apparently it must have become a big support problem by end users discovering it and overwriting the form files and they removed it.

For that PA/NJ SUTA tax item, since it is an employer deduction, the only option I can think of is to mark that employee as exempt from SUTA and the calculate the percent on their wages separate from the other employees.

I've never noticed the forum timing out, and the recent releases of the software actually does an auto save every so often. I've actually started this reply about 20 minutes ago but have been stopped about 4 or 5 times with phone calls and now am done. :-)


On the 1096, you may need update your printer drivers as everything is perfect when printed here on my printer.

[TheBigZ]

I've never noticed the forum timing out, and the recent releases of the software actually does an auto save every so often. I've actually started this reply about 20 minutes ago but have been stopped about 4 or 5 times with phone calls and now am done. :-)



Any chance you have a higher access level than the rest of us? Maybe an admin level that doesn't impose a timeout at all? Not a big deal. Like I said, if it's going to be a long post, or I get interrupted, I just do a copy & paste after it forces me to log back in.

[Paul Mayer]

You are right! I just went through the forum settings and there is a session timeout and it is 15 minutes if no keyboard activity. The administrator is no limit which is why I've never seen it happen.

[TheBigZ]

Sometimes takes more than 15 minutes just to sort out the voices in my head. Especially during tax season.