Payroll Tax Table Maintenance

[JerryR]

As a recent convertee from QB I am very disappointed in several things about Peachtree Accounting 2005, but the most heartburn comes from the payroll tax table maintenance.

As a small company with only a few employees I don't feel the $199 is a justifiable amount to pay for their service and would gladly pay someone else to set that up for me rather than give them any more of my money!

[Lisa_p]

In QB you would have been paying $179 for the tax tables, so is a $20 difference enought to give you heartburn?

Why did you switch?

[JerryR]

To be honest, I was not using the tax service from QB. QB allowed me to simply enter the deductables and company matches during payroll entry - I don't believe PT allows me to do that.

I used QB 2002 and switched based on my CPA's recomendation.

[Lisa_p]

Those darn CPAs!!

Anyway, you can do it the same way in Peachtree. In Maintain, Employee Defaults, just uncheck the CALC box for all of the taxes and then you can key in whatever you want on the payroll entry. If you're using "Select for Payroll Entry", you have to double click on the name and then you can type in the deductions.

It might be easier to just use the "Payroll entry" function and do them one at a time.

[JerryR]

Actually, I did try that and I was greeted with a number of messages 'Could not find...'. Yes, I can click out of those, but it's irritating.

Also, doing it this way did not seem to calculate the Employer Contributions.

Finally, unless I'm mistaken, the only way to print out completed 940's etc is to subscribe to their services - QB did not require that!

The manual and help screens aren't much help when it comes to user maintained tax tables, and I believe that's intentional, just to irritate us small users and force us to pay their subscription fee.

Gee, I'm starting to sound like a grouchy old man... and I'm really not. I'm just a one man show trying to get by.

Thanks for your input.

[Lisa_p]

You missed the part I wrote about going to Employee Defaults and Uncheck the Calc box on each tax. Then it won't look for the calculations and you won't get those pesky messages.

By employer contributions - are you talking about retirement plan contributions? The payroll wizard walks you through setting those up and creates the necessary formulas and puts them in the user maintained tax table for you. So for those, you would leave the CALC box checked since the formula will be there.

I'm not sure about the printing of the forms without the payroll service, but you can generate the reports and fill it out by hand.

Hope this helps.

[SCWeber]

I don't subscribe to their payroll, but I do print out the 941's and W2's. It hasn't been a problem.