Bookkeeping For Dummies, 2nd Edition

Chapter 20

Completing Year-End Payroll and Reports

In This Chapter

Mastering employee reporting

Preparing forms for vendors and contractors

Taking care of annual tax summaries

Even though you’ve diligently filed all your quarterly employee reports with the federal government, you still have a lot of paperwork to complete at the end of the year. You need to file forms for each of your employees as well as any independent contractors you’ve paid over the course of the year.

Yes, you guessed it. End-of-the-year government paperwork takes lots of time. To help make it as painless as possible, though, this chapter reviews the forms you must complete, the information you need for each form, and the process for filing your company’s payroll information with the federal government.

Year-End Employee Reporting

You may think that you’ve had to do a lot of government paperwork related to your payroll throughout the year, but you haven’t seen anything yet. End-of-year payroll reporting requires lots of forms and lots of time.

Although the federal government doesn’t require that you prepare a separate wage and tax statement for each employee during the year, it’s something you have to do at ...