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Live Interactive Forum: Sales Tax Experts Explain Supreme Court Decision

In June, the Supreme Court changed the rules for your sales tax liabilities outside your home state. No longer can you rely on a lack of physical presence in a state to avoid its sales liability. if you sell outside of Texas or Louisiana this is a very big deal!

Our partners at Avalara brought together two leading tax policy experts – Scott Peterson and Rachel Le Mieux, CPA, CMI – to break down the ruling and explain some key parts of this new world. You can participate in this live presentation on Thursday, July 12 at 1 PM CDT. This one-hour session will include:

  • Whether remote sellers need to file and register in more states
  • How the ruling affects future laws across other states
  • How to determine whether you’re on the hook for sales tax based on where you conduct business
  • AND: Live Audience Q&A! 

You can’t afford to miss this forum! Join us on July 12 for Q&A Forum: Tax Experts Explain Supreme Court Decision on Nexus.

Reserve Your Seat Now

If you can’t attend, do register anyway, so that you can later see the recording anytime. 

Or, you can call us! Jerry Norman at 512.419.1444 ext 112.

 

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How to Start Simplifying Your Inventory Tangle

As a distributor or manufacturer (or both!) inventory can be the part of your business that consumes most of your management time and money. This doesn’t have to be.
 
Simplifying inventory management while reducing the amount of cash it ties up is one of the top reasons for changing accounting systems. Questions about inventory stock levels, pricing, order availability, and sales behavior too often drive a need for inventory specialist who spends all of their time buried in paper, excel sheets, and phone calls. The right accounting system, the right decision-assist tools, integrations with your suppliers, and an appropriate warehouse management system really can bring all of this into a readily understood and controlled center.
 
We can help you untangle this problem and bring sanity to your current near-madness. Oh – it also brings happier customers, higher margins more cash.
 
Can you afford this? First, take a measure of your current performance. This short entry from our DSD Systems partner’s blog covers the basics of key measures to calculate:
  • Gross Margin
  • Average Inventory Level
  • Item Fill Rate
  • Turnover Ratio
Start there. Get your baseline. Now determine three things to improve which would make those. Odds are that to make those improvements you must change the way you capture and handle the inventory data from PO to receipt to stocking to customer shipment. This usually involves both a technology enhancement and training for improved practices. 
 
One goal is to easily and regularly get accurate reports on the KPI’s (Key Performance Indicators like the four above) so you can track and encourage progress toward the improvements. This reporting must be automatic and reliable to be effective. Dashboards and alerts are natural parts of this.
 
Need some help getting started? Call us and we can help you plot an Inventory Control Roadmap that is right for you! (512)419-1444 x112.

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Important Sage 100 Payroll Change

Sage 100 Payroll starts a significantly new authorization scheme in a couple of weeks. Users of this module must pay attention to this important change to avoid glitches in their May payroll operations. 
 

Sage changed the Sage 100 Payroll fees.

Your Payroll module’s pricing was different during your last Sage Business Care renewal. Sage now charges for your payroll module baseImpoerd on the number of employees you pay. When you renewed, you told Sage the maximum number of payments you would make in a payroll period. Sage calculated your fee from that.
 
If you try to run more checks than your subscription allows, it prints only up to the authorized count. If you happen to let your renewals lapse, your payroll won’t process at all. Your updated software now communicates with Sage’s “mother ship” to keep everybody honest about the count and the renewal date. 
 
This change, while annoying, brings Sage’s practice into line with just about every other way to run payroll. There simply aren’t many, if any, accounting packages that don’t have some gating to enforce payments based on employee counts and periodic payments. 
 

Check your Sage 100 Payroll Module’s Expiration Date.

Your Sage payroll module starts enforcing this licensing method on May 1, 2017. Be sure to check now that the correct renewal date shows in your system. Go to Library Master/Setup/System Configuration, and look under the Modules tab. Notice the “Payroll Subscription Expiration” Field. If that date is 4/30/2017 or earlier, your payroll will not run in May or beyond. (If you don’t find this field, please call us. We can discuss options for upgrading your version.)
 
If you have questions or concerns and you are covered by our Knowledge Transfer Agreement (KTA), call Jerry Norman at (512) 419-1444 x112, and we’ll help you figure out what needs to happen. If our KTA doesn’t cover you, then call your Sage Support contact. Of course, you could also call Jerry to buy one of our KTA’s and then have us work your payroll challenges!

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What is 90 Minds? Listen to the Podcast.

We’ve been members of the 90 Minds Consulting Group since 2012. This group of consultants and VARs provides mutual technical and business support to help with the daily challenges they face while meeting the needs of their customers using business management technology (accounting, ERP, CRM, HRMS and related systems). Its 150 consultants are located in 17 states, and they have expertise in software from Sage, Microsoft, Intuit, SAP, xTuple and others.

Over the years we received a tremendous amount of technical knowledge which we have used liberally to help our customers solve glitches and improve their operations. We also benefited from many discussions that help us improve our business and its continued delivery of value to our customers. Of course we have also given back liberally in both those departments!

It is a tremendously useful resource that SmartBridge uses to help our customers. Jerry Norman, our CEO, is now on its Board of Directors to help the group move even further in beneficial directions.

The 2017 annual meeting, the “Meeting of the Minds,” starts on February 24th in San Diego (a great place to hold a voluntary conference in February if you want to attract those ‘schmoes in the snow!’) Enterprise Software Podcasts interviewed Jerry last week about 90 Minds, its value to its members and their customers, and the discussions we plan for MOTM.

The link to the interview is here, and the part about 90 Minds starts at 19:50. We hope that it helps you understand more about what we do to help you get more value from your Business Management System.

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Checklist for Sage 100 Payroll Year-end Processing

Generating your year-end payroll and generating the annual reports is a straightforward process within Sage 100 Payroll.

The goal is to create the final pay run for your employees in a way that lets you then create all of the reports and filings without modification. Follow these steps to a stress-free tax filing month!

  1. Run and Update all final payrolls for the year. This includes all checks dated in the tax year for which you are filing W-2s.
    • Be sure to set the dates for the checks and the accounting period to both be in the tax year.
    • Verify that the Years to retain eFiling history in Payroll Options is set appropriately. More is usually better.
    • Confirm that payroll checks have been posted, and the G/L postings made too.
  2. Print the Sage 100 payroll reports. If you haven’t already done so, this is a great time to start with Paperless Office!

  3. Generate Federal & State quarterly and annual tax forms and reports from the Company.

  4. Reconcile tax forms generated in Aatrix to your Sage 100 reports.
    • If you’ve been following these procedures during the year for your regular filings, this should be no trouble.
    • Follow the procedures in the linked support article.
    • If you must modify, make changes in Sage 100. Pay close attention to match the accounting date to the payroll dates!
  5. Make an Archive copy (backup) of the Live Company Code now. This will hold all the detailed data from your 2016 payroll, since the details will be eliminated when you close the year.

  6. Download and Install the year-end software updates before generating W-2s and other government forms and reports. Call SmartBridge Partners for help if you don’t feel comfortable installing this IRD (Interim Release Download); assistance in this is part of your Knowledge Transfer Agreement.

  7. Generate Federal & State quarterly and annual tax forms and reports from the Live Company.

  8. Generate and process W-2s from the Live Company, which still has all of the details of the updated 2016 payroll data.

  9. Perform year-end processing in Payroll in the Live Company. Before you do, re-check that you made your Archive copy; this step will irretrievably eliminate the payroll details, which is necessary before you can start processing for the 2017 tax year.

  10. Download and install tax table updates (TTU) for the new tax year. These are the tax rates you will use for 2017 payrolls.

  11. Review and complete setup requirements for the Affordable Care Act (ACA) for the filing year.

Of course, if you have questions or problems about these, let us know. The call is included as part of your Knowledge Transfer Agreement.