This year-end webinar for Sage Intacct processing covers:
Danica: Today Todd parsons will be our presenter. Todd is a Sage Intacct Solution Architect he has been with RKL for almost two years and has been working with Sage Software for over five. Before coming to RKL, Todd was a controller and he has a specialty in financial processes.
Also don't forget your RKL account rep is Lisa Gillett so please don't hesitate to contact her should you have any solutions regarding your sage software. So without delay, let's get started.
Todd: Okay, good morning and good afternoon everybody, we're going to go ahead and get started in this on today's year-end planning for Sage Intacct. We're going to cover things that you don't have to do which is always good, year-end preparation, fiscal year-end close process create fiscal year reporting periods, probably the subject of everybody's questions on the call, 1099 preparation and processing, since the IRS was nice enough to make some changes for us this year, then we're going to go over some frequently asked questions, and again please don't hesitate at any time to reach out with any questions that you have during, and we'll try to get them answered as soon as we can.
So first part is, and this is something that people newer to Intacct absolutely love, and that's things that you don't have to do anymore.
So things you no longer have to worry about with Sage Intacct are:
For year-end preparation, you do need to close, or use best practice to close your sub ledgers, meaning your AP, AR, PO, order entry, etc.. You can close all entities at once, or one entity at a time, or if you have them set up in groups you can do it through there. The best practice, as always, is to close monthly, or quarterly and close as you go rather than just closing at the end of the year.
For those of you newer to this in order to close a sub ledger in this example on the screen here we have the accounts payable module and we go over here to where it says sub-ledger and close and then you can click your entity or group and choose the period which you want to close whether it be the month end quarterly end or in this case here year end.
Before you do the close, you're going to want to reconcile your sub-ledgers to your control accounts okay for reconciliation purposes run the sub ledger reports by GL posting date so your vendor aging report and your customer agent report you want to make sure that you select a date here to run as use 12-31 2020 and the GL posting date and you want to validate that your total balance there matches what your AP or AR accounts show in your general ledger report. If they're not in balance, look for manual journal ledger entries that were created in those sub-ledger accounts. Also look at cutoff dates, or you can contact RKL for additional assistance.
Okay a lot of the times we have your control account set to disallow direct posting, which is on this slide right here, and if you don't have that you may want to consider adding that to your control accounts select disallow direct posting to prevent direct entry of journal entries to the sub ledger control account use this control to ensure that account balance for the sub ledger account is accurate and has the necessary ledger details supporting the figure rather than the direct entry which would be reflected which would not be reflected in the sub ledger area the best practice is to turn on all control turn this on for all control out accounts and retain earnings.
Once you close your control account or sub-ledgers you want to close your general ledger and the closing of periods is super easy. You do not have to close your sub-ledgers individually you, can close everything through the general ledger again. Not as we recommend, we recommend closing each one of those on a monthly basis; it's easy as closing and opening periods just go to general ledger, all books, and then you want to hit close and again you'll see the entity or group and then close for this the period. In this particular case we're talking about year-end 2020, but you could if you're doing it on a monthly basis or quarterly basis choose those periods as well.
The next thing you want to do is create your fiscal year reporting periods.
Create new reporting periods; this is done typically once a year, but you can do it in advance. And to do this, you would go to company setup, import data, okay, and if for some reason you wouldn't have that, that may be a permissions related issue, just check with one of your system administrators to validate that you have that permission. Scroll down to the general ledger transactions here, and then find the reporting periods here, and then you want to select default. Now I just want to kind of caution that default and import are two separate buttons here to click. I know myself I tend to hit import all the time because that's usually what we're doing but the default is a separate button here to click, so you want to click default and then that will create two years worth of reporting for you.
Once you click that button and you get the okay that it rolled forward I would suggest that you come in here and validate that they're there so navigate to reporting periods by going to reports set up and then reporting periods. Here's where you can review and confirm that the reporting periods are set up and we'll see here that we have 2021 now in here. Again, I mentioned earlier that you can choose calendar year ends you can choose month ends you can do quarter ends; those are the different ways you can close your books and also the same for how you can run your reports.
Year-end close things to remember: make a year and month end checklist. Checklists can be very very beneficial for you m it'll help enable you to know what it needs to be done when. It also kind of gives you that ability to say where am I at in the close process oh I'm here I can just kind of check this off and move on to the next one. You want to develop and document a closed process and that closed process will vary from company to company, that's one of the reasons why we don't have like a generic one that we send out to you. Define tasks and responsibilities to team members, that way everybody knows who's responsible for what so that nothing falls through the cracks. Set due dates, and, of course, we definitely want to assign responsibilities. We don't want to take on all everything to do ourselves.
Okay you want to lock down retain earnings. You never want to do adjustments to retain earnings, only system created journal entries. Okay so at the end of the year everything will close to to retain earnings. When you run reports you'll see that period to date close to retained earnings. We don't want to do anything manual to retain earnings, that will happen system generated. There's no need to touch retained earnings or perform an official close process but you do want to reconcile your sub-ledgers and again this is kind of where things tend to get out of balance from time to time. If you can't figure it out, most of the time somebody posted something to direct earnings that they shouldn't have, or I'm sorry, to retain earnings that they shouldn't have, but if it's something you can't figure out again RKL is here to help we are always here to help.
1099 processing the tax forms are now available you can get the 1099 forms through sageintacct.com and then, just to let you know, everything those forms are updated. I was on the call with somebody about two weeks to go and they went in there and when they clicked on the preview now to see the forms it still had the 2019 forms. The new forms are updated I called them and talked to them about that and made sure that that was handled and I went on the website yesterday and validated that they had updated that. So if you are going to print the forms out yourself, this is the website you would want to go to get those forms. You can also go to the home page under resources, checks and supplies. That's a hyperlink that'll take you there as well.
1099 preparation and processing: As far as for the vendor setup, if you don't have your vendors set up for 1099s yet you want to go into accounts payable and set up and vendors and then when you edit the vendor the additional information tab, tag them as 1099 eligible and then when you go to save it it will bring up a box and allow you to pick the proper form and the proper box for that form. If they have a separate name that they use for their 1099 you can put that in here and what it'll print out will be the 1099 name in conjunction with the vendor name as well. If you are a new customer and you have initial values because you had did a mid-year go live you would enter the year-to-date balances from your old system found in the initial values for year drop down list. Then enter the start and year-to-date balances in those fields. Future amounts you pay to the vendor through Sage Intacct are added to the amounts if any you enter here.
Okay I've read through that a few times I kind of give a break down here. When you click save on the 1099 vendor and you choose the box here 1099 NEC form and you choose the box one any values that you had for 2020 before you came into Intacct you would put right in here. Those values, anything that you did it Intacct will automatically add to those at the end. Okay again, tip, remember only enter the calendar year-to-date 1099 balance for each vendor okay from your old system.
Okay 1099 preparation and processing: 1099 printing, in order to print your 1099s go to the accounts payable under all the third column over which is where all your reports are. You'll see a 1096 1099 and then when you click on there you'll have the options here to pick the 1096 form 1099 form report or create a file if you're going to send that to a third party system. When printing the 1099s you have the ability to exclude credit card transactions uh here and that's under accounts payable reports 1099 or 1096 1099 the 1099 form exclude credit card payments those credit card payments are payments that happen through your credit card journal if you just put the credit card information in the memo field I've seen a couple people do that and they want to know why it's not excluding them it's actually not going to if it's just in the memo field it has to actually be done as a credit card transaction.
Okay the 1099 create file screen enables you to create a data file that you can send to a third-party service that specializes in printing and mailing 1099 forms. These services also file the required information with the internal revenue service. You can export the file offline in either .csv or excel format, or you can export the data online in one of the following file formats: .csv, excel, .xml, or .xsd depending on what your third party would like. So when you're in that screen on the 1099 create file it'll allow you to process offline or or you can do it online. If you have a lot of 1099 vendors and 1099 forms you won't be able to do anything else while that's running. If you do it online that's why the ability to do it right to run that export offline is there it'll just process it and store it so you can go back and get it later when it's done.
Okay so 1099 preparation and processing frequently asked questions:
I'm sure every one of you remembers your implementation and how we we raved about how great the help menus are those are definitely your friends and you want to use those. You also have the ability to select Sage Intacct Community hopefully you've all registered for Community accounts they are free for all users if you have not you can reach out to us. When you click on community to create an account it's going to ask you for your client id and that's not a readily available number so feel free to reach out to us and we can get you that information. For our support you would email support@rklesolutions.com. You should be familiar with where the help menu is at the top right hand corner of Intacct just make sure you're looking at either help on this page or help in general.
That is my part of the presentation so we wanted to share with you guys the Sage Intacct budgeting and Planning virtual series this will be a Win Weekly Wednesday Wisdom series covering Intacct budgeting planning topics the series will explore how you can further drive efficiency and success within your business the sage Intacct product experts will share best practices tips and tricks and other ways Intacct innovation can help you with your Sage Intacct investment. What's great right now is they are currently running a 50% off any new SIBP purchase and what makes this even more attractive is that it's in perpetuity but you must be purchased by December 31 so if you have any questions regarding Sage Intacct Budgeting and Planning and if that would be a good fit for you please contact your cam Lisa Gillett for more questions.
Also Sage is offering a series of virtual meetup sessions for Sage Intacct clients where you can learn from other Intacct customers and share experiences and best practices. They will also be sharing some road map updates and product enhancements so we will be publishing these dates in the upcoming year-end newsletter which will come out later this week or early next week so look for that information on both of those.
Q: If we need to make adjustments should we reopen or use adjustments if we need to make adjustments where audit adjustments?
A: It is best practice to use the adjustments factor feature in there to make those adjustments you can do it the other way but again, it gives you kind of snapshot of this - this came from the audit adjusters.