Understanding the Year-End Reporting Process

After you review year-end workfile information online and make any necessary corrections, print the audit reports and review them again for accuracy. We recommend that you run the audit reports and compare them to the taxation history reports.

You print year-end forms to create an audit trail for reporting to the government and to send to employees for their tax reporting purposes. We recommend that before you print year-end forms, you review the audio reports for accuracy

To report year-end information to the federal government, use paper or electronic filing.

Important: The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) requires electronic filing if you have a specific number of returns. The Accounts Payable system can also produce 1099 returns. Therefore, consider the number of returns that the Accounts Payable and the Payroll systems will generate when deciding whether you are required to use electronic filing reporting. Contact the IRS office for more information about electronic filing reporting requirements.

After you create the workfile but before you print year-end forms, carefully verify the amounts on the audit reports. You can run the audit reports as many times as necessary without affecting the workfiles that the year-end workfile build process creates. You can also review the amounts online by using the Form Review selections from the U.S. Year-End Workbench.

Before you run audit reports, you must update the year-end ID to specify which reports are available for processing. To update the year-end ID, you set up a report model that includes all reports that you might want to run for a particular year-end ID. Also, include versions for printing year-end forms in the report model.

For W-2 purposes only, you can enter more than one version number for a form ID. This lets you submit different versions of the same report to process simultaneously. For example, you can run version 001 and 002 of the W-2 Federal Detail report.

After you review the audit reports for accuracy, you can print year-end forms by using the special form versions that you included in the report model. You can omit specific versions from processing, such as special form versions, without deleting them from the report model.