W-2 is the employee’s annual wage and tax statement; it reports the gross wages earned and taxes withheld during the calendar year. The employee uses the W-2 to report their income on their Form 1040.
The Internal Revenue Service scrutinizes expenses that can and often are benefits to owners. The most common benefit is the use of a company owned car for personal travel including using the car to get to and from work. Owners would love to have this cost of travel paid by the company and deductible for tax purposes.
Federal and state compliance requires the filing of several different reports by certain deadlines. In this lesson I explain the various reports, filing deadlines and best practices to comply with the law. I’ll explain the quarterly set of reports first then the respective annual requirements.
Similar to the bookkeeping cycles, payroll cycles have many frequent activities, fewer incremental requirements and one important end of the year report. This lesson explains these respective cycles and how they tie together for the final year-end report. Other lessons in this section of the website go into some details about various functions of payroll and are linked when appropriate.
For us accountants January brings the greatest payroll function of the year; printing the year end payroll reports. These include the W-2’s, W-3 and Form 940. They all must tie to the combined total of the quarterly 941 reports and the deposits made to the Internal Revenue Service.
Form 941 is the employer’s quarterly federal tax return. It reports how much federal income taxes were withheld; Social Security taxes and Medicare taxes that are due and how much was paid in deposits to the Internal Revenue Service. The report is filed every three months for each of the four calendar quarters.
I dread January of every year. I have to spend so much time preparing the year-end payroll reports prior to the January 31 deadline. Not only must your quarterly’s and monthly’s tie together, but it has to match the general ledger at year-end.
