End of Year file maintenance

[stevah]

Although I am not in the computer business I can manage files as long as I understand what I am supposed to be doing. I spent many years in school in my field and find reasonable intelligent people remarkable ignorant about basic things I take for granted.

AS far as I can tell, the end of the year file copying and renaming is straight forward although no actual purpose is stated. The purpose seems to becomes lost as the instructions progress.
Not being in the computer business I would say, "we need to save our recent year of data. In order to do this we will copy, paste and rename the file in the same folder it is already in for future reference." Sometimes it just helps to have the big picture.

Having understood that much I then get totally lost because I don't understand why we would now point the program to the copied and renamed, (now with a year) file, as we are instructed to do. Perhaps Paul was telling us how to access that saved file if we ever needed to get back to our past year database, I am not sure, he didn't say. What really confuses me is how coping and renaming a file is supposed to get rid of old employees. Paul did state somewhere that was a good reason to do this file management. Would we not need a new empty file to do this? My old employees are still in the file I copied and renamed, and also in the original so possibly I should consider taking a basic course in windows because this is over my head. :confused:

[Paul Mayer]

When you run the end of year tool, it deletes all employees that are marked as Unemployed and all payroll transactions. That's the purpose of the yearly (copy of the database). Also by renaming them with the year makes it easy to select and open if needed.

Instructions can be seen in this Tutorial:

http://zpay.com/PayWindowTutorials/EndOfYearTools/

Doing this of course does not mean you do not need to print your reports and save them in case of any future audits as the IRS does not want to look at a computer screen, they want a paper trail.

[stevah]

Having little experience with the IRS, my question is what reports, for my small business, would be advisable to print out on paper at years end before running the "end of year tool"?

[Paul Mayer]

The 941, 940, W2 Forms, employee Normal 80 report and the Employer Totals Report. And make sure you make a backup and do what I do as seen in this Tutorial having a copy of each year just a few clicks away:

http://zpay.com/PayWindowTutorials/EndOfYearTools/