Finish the year strong and be ready for 2020
As the end of the year quickly approaches – many organizations begin their payroll, human resources and finance activities without a standard, well-defined checklist or process. This lack of planning often leads to chaos, not to mention clean-up activities after the first of the year. Organizations end up wasting money and wasting the valuable time of their staff and employees.
In order to help you avoid a similar situation, we reached out to our Alight experts. They provided a year-end checklist for payroll – with a healthy dose of HR and finance.
First, consider any complex regulatory or organizational changes that can create challenges throughout the year for many companies. This often leads to wage and deduction changes at federal, state and local levels. In addition, health care, retirement and other benefit program changes can require payroll programming changes.
A company that is utilizing financials on a digital platform has quick access to this data throughout the year. With machine learning, repeatable items for year-end can be completed digitally versus manually, leaving less room for human error or oversight.
You'll need to make these changes prior to producing the year-end tax forms, or the first check of the new year. If there are any organizational changes, ensure - those required checks and balances are completed for proper wage taxation or benefit program compliance.
Here are some important year-end and year-begin checklist items that will also help your HR, payroll and finance teams:
- Start early and use a year-round approach by standardizing your human resource processes with checklists and templates
- Create standard tax and payroll-related project plans complete with task details, time tables and resource names
- Ensure line items are added for input files such as relocation files, car allowances and imputed income files. These should be complete with file IDs and load dates.
- Create a plan for how errors or omissions will be handled.
- Plan for your payroll project methodology to be tested before first use.
- Develop quarterly and year-end tax and wage balancing checklists to ensure payroll tax data integrity. Include checking the accuracy of crucial W4 data such as EINs, FICA wages and tax, Boxes 10-14, negative amounts, and missing SSNs.
- Create risk mitigation templates and spend time discussing and developing plans with action steps to reduce or eliminate year-end payroll risks.
- Create standard wage and deduction audit checklists that will ensure accurate payroll and income tax data mapping to tax forms. A second set of eyes will often catch a simple error that could save hundreds of amendments.
- Check for and address all payroll and tax compliance and regulatory changes throughout the year such as Social Security and Medicare base wage limit changes and retirement plan limits. Capture this information in standard human resource plans.
- Validate FEIN/EIN for payroll withholding accuracy and check SSA/other employer tax audits to ensure timely and accurate transmissions. These steps could help avoid large penalties to government agencies.
Looking for a trusted partner to help you with year-end activities for payroll, HR, finance and more? Alight Solutions has a structured oversight program to help with year-end and year-begin tasks. Our program comes complete with standard templates and checklists to ensure a thorough approach is followed organizationally as a year-round effort.