2018 Tax Tables:

As you are aware, the new tax laws were enacted last week, and this will have a significant change to payroll calculations for 2018.  This goes beyond simply changing the tables.  It is believed the IRS will issue a whole new W-4 form to accommodate the changes and there may be significant changes to how deductions are calculated.  

What is clear is that nobody can do anything to plan for this until the IRS guidelines are formulated, and it is expected we will not see this until late January, or perhaps February.  In addition, an early analysis of the legislation as written suggests there are many areas that are simply not clear, and this will require the IRS to issue rulings ( with possible changes coming thereafter due to court filings ).

At this time we have seen nothing from the IRS regarding how to proceed in the interim.  Thus we are not issuing new 2018 tax tables at this time.  We will monitor this situation on a daily basis and once guidelines are available, the Payroll section of ASW 10 will be modified accordingly.  We will keep you posted in our bulletins as new information is provided.

General Closing Guidelines:

In most cases, there are no year end closings required.  Those recommended will be described in the following sections.  It is always helpful to keep some information at the end of the year, and this can be found in your reports.  You could print these, but that takes up a lot of paper, and storage space.  We’d suggest you run the report, but instead of printing them, you can save them to PDF files.  Simply run the report, select View, then when the preview shows, click on the Adobe icon that says Export to PDF.  Give it a descriptive name, including the year, ie “AR Summary 2017”, and save them to a USB drive, or DVD.  Then place that storage media in a safe place.

Your system automatically saves backups of the files each day.  We suggest you also add the last 5 backups to that same removable media device.  

Inventory

The Inventory system accumulates the totals automatically for all sales.  You can run, and save, reports at the end of the year, and then run Tools -> Utilities -> Close to update the previous year totals, and zero out the monthly totals.

Payroll

After you run the last payroll of the year, you will want to run and save a final set of reports, and then do a closing.  This is found under Tools -> Closing, and needs to be performed before running the first payroll of the new year.

General Ledger

Most people receive information from their accountants to be added as year end items for the General Ledger, and that occurs in early January.  The main rule here is to not do a monthly closing in 2018 until you have finished posting 2017, and closed it.  The steps are simple:  1). Be sure you have closed each month of 2017.  2) Run any reports and save them.  3). Run the Close ( button on main GL bar ) following the prompts carefully.  That’s it.

After closing the GL, some people report an imbalance in the GL to start the new year.  The amount is ALWAYS the retained earnings.  Simply add that amount to your Retained Earnings account and Re-sum.

Any Questions ?

Please feel free to email support@masterlinksoftware.com for assistance.  You should receive an answer quickly.  If you don’t, it may be that the email was not sent correctly by your system, or to the wrong address.  Reach out with a quick call to be sure it was received if you don’t get that fast response.  Remember, we never use scripted emails … everyone is written to answer your question, and if the one we provide is not sufficient, please follow up.