Page 131 - Essentials of Payroll: Management and Accounting

ESSENTIALS of Payr oll: Management and Accounting
format from any of the national tax reporting services. This informa-
tion can then be stored in the forms/rates data warehouse.
The next step is to create a separate program for each of the tax
reports, so that the computer report issued mimics the reporting format

used by each state. Then the information can be manually transferred
from the computer report to a printout of the Portable Document
Format (PDF) file of each state’s tax form. Those programming staffs
that have the time, may also want to create a report format that mirrors
each state tax form. These forms then can be printed out, with all tax
information on them, and immediately mailed out.
The trouble with this best practice is the exceptionally high pro-

gramming cost associated with developing a completly automated solu-
tion, because there are so many tax forms to be converted to a digital
format. Accordingly, it is more cost-effective to determine which tax
forms share approximately the same information, and then develop an
automated solution for them first.Any remaining tax forms that require
special programming to automate should be reviewed on a case-by-case
basis to determine whether it is cost-beneficial to complete further pro-
gramming work or to leave a few reports for the tax preparation staff
to complete by hand.

Cost:
Installation time:

104