Oregon employers also need to verify that the right amount of Oregon State Withholding Tax is being deducted from their Oregon employees. It would appear that the new State of Oregon Tax Calculations for 2012 are meant for “Withholding Wages” and not “Gross Wages” paid. The new tax calculations, combined with the new tax statuses for employees who make more than $50,000 annually but have either a 401k Plan, or a Cafeteria Plan that reduces their Withholding Wage, have resulted in employees not having enough state tax withheld. An example is an employee who makes $55,000, and has a 401k Plan that takes out $500 per month. The tax status for the employee apparently should not be one of the “more than $50,000” tax statuses, since the employee’s annual withholding wage is only $49,000 ($55,000 – [$500 x 12 months]). Please double check your employee’s withholding amounts – we’ve found many employees who are making between $42,000 and $49,000 who are only having $28 of Oregon State Withholding taken out each paycheck because of the combination of the Oregon State Tax statuses and the Withholding Wage being less than $50,000 – and that is just not enough tax being taken out.

In the meantime, Employers using the MAS 90/200 Payroll module can set up a Deduction Code, flagged as an Employer Contribution, to start tracking the Healthcare costs that need to appear on the 2012 W-2’s.  If you need help with doing so, please give our office a call and we’ll be happy to give you your options for setting up that Healthcare Benefit!

Sage republished the Payroll Tax Tables for the State Of Oregon on January 9th (they had to add a new calculation step in the Payroll Tax Tables) and we once again sent out an email saying “Play Ball!”.  Although it looks like everything works as it should, there appears to be an oddity with employees who make more than $50,000 in wages, but who have a Cafeteria Plan or Pension Plan that reduces their Withholding Wages down to $42,000 to $44,000.  Stay tuned – we’re not sending another email out just yet – but we reserve the right to do so!

And just think:  We might be doing this all over again at the end of February!  As one of my very close friends would say “Oy Vey!”

December 9, 2011

Middletown, NJ – Progressive Media Group’s Bob Scott’s Insights (www.BobScottsInsights.com) has selected Bennett/Porter & Assoc. as a winner of its 2011 VAR Stars award. One hundred resellers are selected each year for this honor.

2011 VAR Stars have a practice involving the sale of mid-market financial software and while most derive significant revenue from other sources, accounting software is the core to their business.

Revenue is not a factor in selection and VARs are not rated. The No. 1 and No. 100 members of this list have equal standing. Factors taken into consideration included growth, industry leadership and innovation. There are very large and very small dealers in this list. An effort was also made to selects resellers who represent a broad range of products.

This year, VAR Star candidates were asked what they have done to respond to the economic conditions. Several common areas emerged from those VARs who commented (not all provided this information.) Few of these were surprising, but all are important.

They are as follows:

• Diversifying product lines.
• Holding onto talent.
• Maintaining or increasing marketing budgets.
• Performing mergers and acquisition.

Bob Scott’s Insights provides the mid-market reselling community with news and analysis giving them insight into the issues that affect the business of resellers and vendors alike. It informs and entertains, giving this critical market a quick-and-easy read that is both instructive and interesting.

Bob Scott has been informing and entertaining the mid-market financial software community with his email newsletters for 12 years. And he has been covering this market through print publications for 20 years, first as technology editor of Accounting Today and then as the Editor of Accounting Technology from 1997 through June 2009. He has covered the traditional tax and accounting profession during the same time and continues to address that profession as executive editor of The Progressive Accountant.

Bob Scott can be reached directly at bob.scott@pmgb2b.com.

SOUND TOO GOOD TO BE TRUE? – Not really. However, as with any upgrade, we urge you to advance with a bit of optomistic caution. We urge you to not upgrade to Level 4.5 without assistance. We have years of experience moving clients from one version to another. Let us guide you through necessary steps to ensure your upgrade is completes sucessfully. Typically, we virogously test new releases first before we subject them to our clients. Once we are satisfied that level 4.5 is stable with last minute modifications and fixes, we will happily be asking our clients to upgrade to it if they wish to do so. However – if you wish to get started using CRM, we can get you started immediately!

If you have any questions about the new 4.5 release to include the free CRM system, or if you’d like to discuss upgrading, just give us a call at 503-620-3484 or send us an e-mail and we’ll be glad to assist you!

So, I called the airline back, asked how to change an existing reservation online, and was told that I would need to speak to someone in Customer Service.  After explaining what it was I was trying to do (for the second time in this phone call) I was transferred to another specialist, who told me that I needed to speak to a "web specialist”.  (You’ve all called the airlines – by now I’m 45 minutes into the phone call waiting to speak with the appropriate person.)  When I eventually did get to the web specialist, he told me that he couldn’t help me – he could only help me if I was having internet issues, or a specific website issue .    (I thought I was having a specific website issue, but apparently that was a matter of opinion.)  While holding all over again for yet another person to speak with, I finally figured out that by pulling up the existing online reservation, going all the way through the reservation to the end, I could actually change the dates and use my credit card for the $150 fee. 

My  point is, over the course of two phone calls, I ended up speaking to 6 people.  I’m wondering if they still think it was worth $75.00 to have me make the change online, since my future travel plans will include attempting to avoid this airline altogether.  If someone had just told me to pull up the existing reservation, go through it, and at the end I’d have an opportunity to change the dates, it sure would have improved my opinion of the airline.   In this case, not only did the “rule” of having a charge for speaking to a live person seem silly (since I had to speak to 6!), but the Customer Service aspect went right out the door.  Most times rules do need to be followed, but then there are those times when someone just needs to step back and say “Is this reasonable?”    Speaking to 6 people to avoid being charged by 1,  simply wasn’t reasonable!

And, with the State of Oregon requiring that any employer who has 50 or more 2010 W-2’s  to file electronically to the State this year  (for the first time ever), Aatrix just makes it easy to do.  Even if you printed your W-2’s yourself, you can use the Aatrix service to upload the State Copies in the format the State requires, at the cost of .69 cents per W-2.   Just a note – you must be using Level 4.3 or 4.4 of MAS 90/200 in order to use Aatrix,  you have to be registered to access the Sage Website to use the software, and you also have to have a current Sage Subscription as well.   

Things just aren’t as straight forward as they might seem in the world of accounting/distribution/manufacturing software.  We had a consultant years ago that our clients loved.  Absolutely loved.  And the reason they did is that she only gave them one answer, without any probing questions.  When someone asked, “How do you reverse a check in Accounts Payable?”, she told them the easiest way to do it.  It wasn’t necessarily the correct way for their purposes, but it was the quickest way.  The correct answer should have been a series of questions, such as “Do you want to reverse the check totally and just credit back the expense/asset account that was originally charged?   Do you want to set the Payable back up because the check was never received by the Vendor?    Are you reversing the check because the Vendor owes you money and you want to credit off the Invoice you were originally paying?”  The correct answer, instead of just telling clients the most popular way to reverse a check, should have involved the question of why the client wants the check reversed.  That’s where the consulting part of our job comes in.   The problem is, not all clients want us to ask those probing questions.  They just want the answer.  Kinda like my stepdaughter twenty years ago, who I thought I was helping with her math problems by asking different questions to help her get to the right answer.  She finally slammed her book shut and said “I don’t want to know how to do the math problem, I just want the answer.  If you’re not going to give it to me, I’ll just get it from someone before school starts.”

Ours is a fun, but often challenging, job.  If we quickly answer a question without asking probing questions (“And, why do you want to change all of your Inventory Items from a Standard Cost Valuation to Average Cost?”) we could really have a negative impact on their business.    And sometimes if we answer the question quickly, as the client wants us to, it has a negative impact on our business as well.  Over the years, we’ve had several of the “Your staff messed this up – you have to fix it.”  We have had situations where we’ve answered a question in 5 minutes and then spent 2 days of a programmer’s time fixing the problem at no charge because we answered a question too quickly – without finding out the “why”.    And obviously no one can stay in business very long doing that.

So, as annoying as it might be, “probing” questions help us get clients the “right” answer for their particular situation.  And often times, while the question can be asked in less than 10 seconds – the answer takes a lot longer than that!

COSTA MESA, Calif.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–SYSPRO, the leading provider of visionary, pragmatic ERP software, today announced that SYSPRO, recognizing the requirements of an increasingly mobile workforce, is now making SYSPRO ERP software available via the iPhone. SYSPRO ERP users can now run SYSPRO wirelessly and securely anywhere in the world via the iPhone through the utilization of the SYSPRO On the Go iPhone application, which is available for download from the iTunes store.

According to SYSPRO CEO Phil Duff, “We recognize that mobility is the future, and there is no doubt that the mobile device will be the world’s primary computing tool by 2020. To put this in perspective, right now over 90% of US adults own a cell phone, and the computer in your cell phone today is 1 million times cheaper, 1,000 times more powerful and about 100,000 times smaller than the one computer at MIT in 1965. But equally important to SYSPRO is the increasing number of SYSPRO users who have requested remote access to information contained in the SYSPRO ERP database. The capability in the new SYSPRO On the Go iPhone application is indicative of the ways in which SYSPRO continues to listen to and accommodate the needs of its customers as well as market forces.”

Joey Benadretti, SYSPRO USA president, emphasizes that “a demo video” of this new, remote capability is available on the SYSPRO corporate site at www.syspro.com.

About SYSPRO

Since its inception in 1978, SYSPRO has been delivering state-of-the-art business solutions to some of the world’s leading companies. As a global leader in the production of world-class ERP software, the company now caters to the specialized needs of 14,500 licensed companies in more than 60 countries worldwide. SYSPRO is marketed globally through regional territory distribution centers and a global reseller network in the US, Canada, Africa, Asia Pacific, Australia and the UK.

SYSPRO is a fully integrated business software solution that provides complete control over the planning and management of all facets of business including accounting, manufacturing and distribution operations in a variety of industries.