Closing this year’s payroll has presented excellent opportunities. Here are a couple of items that I learned during preparation for year end:

- The GP Year End tax update required/included the service pack 4 installation
- GP 10.0 only supports preprinted W-4 forms
- Allot time to align the preprinted W-4 forms
- It’s good practice to reconcile the federal wages to the state wages. This will ensure the state and federal wages match on the W-4.
- When we ran the quarter end filing, we had to change the system date to 12/31/2009. If we left the date as current, GP thinks we are filing for current quarter in 2010!

Typically When state taxes do not match federal wages, this is caused by a new employee who recently started and their state tax card is not setup correctly. After troubleshooting, we found that the data entry for tax withhelding required tweaking. The payroll admin would input the tax information for the federal tax withholding. She would simply input the state code in the Transaction Tax Defaults field. She did not create a state tax card for the new employee. It was assumed that inputting this field on the federal tax card would default accordingly to the state tax card. This does not. This caused a discrepancy between federal and state wages for a given employee.

Has anyone experienced other types of discrepancies with trying to balance/reconcile payroll?