Payroll due dates always seem to cause a lot of stress – especially at year end when there is so much to do! The holiday’s don’t seem to help matters any either with extra time away from the office, it’s difficult to concentrate, get things done, and stay organized.
Perhaps you are fairly new to payroll in general and this is the first time that you’ve had to deal with year end tasks and are feeling totally overwhelmed.
Year-end payroll tasks start in December and really can continue right through the first of April! Yikes – that’s a lot of time to be spending on additional payroll tasks!
There are so many things that need to be taken care of; you need to be organized and have a checklist that includes when certain things have to be completed and helps you to prioritize tasks so that you don’t feel so overwhelmed.
From simple things – like starting around the first of December you should remind employees that if their has been a change in their filing status due to getting married, having or adopting a baby, or perhaps they have a child that is turning 21, that they should fill out a new W-4 form for 2013.
To more complex things – like going through all of your subcontractor payments and determining which payments you need to include on a 1099 vs. those that will be reported by your credit card company using a 1099-K (this is going to be a big headache for many people this year).
My advice:
- Stay calm
- Get yourself organized
- Don’t wait until the last minute
- Plan, plan, plan
One year I had 15 payroll clients and had everything ready to go with the exception of printing out all the final forms and returns. My plan was that I would then take a day and do nothing but print, sort, and package. Then I got really sick for about a week. On the day that I finally was able to drag myself out of bed and attend to this task of printing I discovered that I needed a new toner cartridge for my printer and had to drag myself off to Staples to get one – that was extra stress that I really didn’t need.
My point – expect the unexpected! You NEVER know when something will go wrong.
To help you to get yourself organized, request our free Payroll Due Dates for the year-end 2012 and year-beginning 2013 checklist and to help yourself stay on track year-round, check out our Payroll, bookkeeping and accounting tasks checklist.
NOTE: While this is a free download, we do ask that you submit your name and email address so that we can notify you if this checklist is updated in the future.
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