Page 130 - Essentials of Payroll: Management and Accounting

Payr oll Best Practices
An alternative is to send e-mails to employees that contain this informa-
tion,though some employees may not have e-mail,or may have concerns
that other people can access their e-mail messages.

Cost:

Installation time:

Use a Forms/Rates Data Warehouse for
Automated Tax Filings

Any organization that operates in a number of states will have to file an
inordinate number of sales and income tax returns, not to mention a
plethora of lesser forms.The traditional way to meet these filing require-
ments is to either hire a staff of tax preparation personnel, or outsource
some or all of these chores to a supplier.Either approach represents a sig-
nificant cost. An alternative worth exploring is to store tax rates and
forms in a database that can be used to automatically prepare tax returns
in conjunction with other accounting information that is stored in either
a general ledger or a data warehouse.

To make this best practice operational, you must first have a com-
mon database containing all of the information that would normally be
included on a tax return. This may call for some restructuring of the
chart of accounts, as well as the centralization of companywide data
into a data warehouse (see the preceding best practice).This is no small
task, since the information needed by each state may vary slightly from
the requirements of other states, requiring subtle changes in the storage

of data throughout the company that will yield the appropriate infor-
mation for reporting purposes.
The second step is to obtain tax rate information and store it in a cen-
tral database.This information can be located by accessing the tax agency
web sites of all 50 states; but it is more easily obtained in electronic

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