Sage 100: Action Required: W-4 form changes effective January 1, 2020
The Internal Revenue Service made substantial changes to the tax code that materially impact the 2020 payroll tax year. As a result of these changes, the IRS released a new W-4 form. As you prepare for the next payroll tax year, you need to be aware of some important changes.
What you need to know
- Any new employee starting January 1, 2020 or later must use the new W-4 Employee Withholding Certificate form.
- Effective January 1, 2020 any employee that needs to make changes to their withholdings must use the new W-4 Employee Withholding Certificate form.
- Sage 100 2017 and earlier will not support the additional fields necessary to correctly calculate federal withholding taxes.
For more detailed information about this issue, please see the IRS FAQs regarding the new W-4 form. A draft of the new W-4 form has been provided here by the IRS.
Action required
- If you are using Sage 100 2018 or 2019 install Payroll 2.20.0, due to be released mid-December 2019, and any later updates that are released.
- If you are using Sage 100 2017 or earlier you will need to work with your partner and upgrade to Sage 100 2018 or 2019 to remain compliant.
Note: Sage 100 Payroll is a separate installation from Sage 100 2018 and 2019. New fields in Employee Maintenance for entering the Dependent Amount, Other Income Amount, and
Deductions Amount for 2020 W-4 forms will be available only in Sage 100 Payroll 2.20.0 and later.
Important: If your upgrade is not complete before January 1, 2020 the federal withholding for your employees will not be calculated correctly. You will need to use the IRS calculator to
manually calculate federal withholding for any employees who use the new W-4 for every payroll until you have upgraded.
Questions?
Visit the Sage City Customer Resources page at www.SageCity.com/Resources page for additional resources, including links to Sage Knowledgebase, Sage City and Sage University,
as well as Live Chat and Online Case submission.
Payroll EEO-1 Compliance
On September 30, 2019 Component 2 data—which includes reporting on hours worked and pay information from W2 forms by race, ethnicity, and sex—was due from employers for each period since 2017 in which they had 100 employees or more. To comply, Sage had to make some fundamental changes to what the Payroll module collects. The Sage 100 Payroll 2.19.4 release ensures that your data is recorded and stored in compliance with the changes by including the following features:
- The ethnicity/race field now includes the required categories for EEO-1 Compensation Data reporting
- A new Job Category field was added with the 10 required job categories available for your selection.
Sage 100 2019.2 and Sage Payroll 2.19.4 are both available now and include additional features and functionality we have not highlighted here. If you have questions about the release, or would like to read the official release please see Sage Knowledgebase.
