How to Report Healthcare Costs on Your W2s Using Pro Fund Accounting

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We’re ready for the mandated health care costs that are to be reported on your employees W-2s.
You can get your Pro Fund Accounting software ready, too, by following these steps and watching a short video on how to make the changes. Watch how to report healthcare costs on your employee’s W2s.

Changing the Health Insurance Deduction Codes

  • Under Payroll/Payroll Constants, open Deduction Types and locate your health care deduction code(s)
  • Edit them to remove the information in the W2 Info box and change the Tax Code box from “Box 14” to DD
  • On the Parameter Titles page, in Parameter Title 5, enter “CMP AMT” (stands for Company Amount); this is to hold the amount the employer pays for the employee’s health care

Reflecting the new Deduction Code Requirements in Employee Maintenance

  • In Employee Maintenance, go to the Deductions tab and in the Select Code column, locate the deduction code for the health care deduction(s) that you made in Deduction Maintenance and click it.
  • To “catch up the year” to reflect the amounts paid on the employee’s behalf for the payrolls already paid during 2013, click EDIT, then enter the TOTAL YTD HEALTH CARE paid by the employer in the CMP AMT box before running your next payroll.
  • After the payroll is finished, repeat step 1 in this section, then enter the normal amount paid on the employee’s behalf. If the employee’s status changes during the year, change the amount in this box to the new amount the employer pays.

What is printed on the W-2s
The Health Care Cost and the Tax Code, DD, will be printed in one of the “Box 12” boxes (there are 4 boxes available and, usually, deferred compensation or retirement is printed in the boxes). The amount printed will be a combination of the amounts your employees paid toward their health insurance and the amounts you, as the employer, paid. These two figures, added together, should equal the total amount paid to the insurance company(ies) for health insurance during the year.

Health Insurance Paid in-full by Employer; no health insurance deduction code
After calculating your W-2s for 2013, you will need to edit each W-2 to reflect the amount you, as the employer, paid for each employee’s health insurance.

Explain to your Employees what this is all about
The amount reported does not affect tax liability, as the value of the employer excludible contribution to health coverage continues to be excludible from an employee’s income, and it is not taxable. This reporting is for informational purposes only, to show employees the value of their health care benefits.

You can learn more about Pro Fund Accounting here. If you found this post helpful, please feel free to leave a comment below.

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Brand new changes on all of our websites!

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There are some awesome new changes that were just made to all of our websites!

The vendor for our 866-634-9991 phone number recently published a widget for websites that enables you to call us directly from a website.
We’ve implemented this widget on each of our product support pages, as well as on each of our pricing pages.
So what does this mean for you?
What this means for you is that you will be able to call us directly from our website, without having to enter the phone number into your phone!
Pretty cool huh?
If you would like to try this out, next time you have a support question go to our support pages and click on the blue Click to Call button. Then enter your phone number in the popup and click on Call Me. This will dial your phone number and when you pick up, it will automatically dial our support phone number for you.
This just opens yet another avenue of communication to us and is easily available to you. Try this out, take it for a spin, and if you like it or hate it please leave some feedback in the comment section below. 🙂
Just a refresher, our support pages are as follows:

  1. Pro Fund Accounting: http://www.profundaccounting.com/Support
  2. UtilAbility: http://www.utilability.com/Support
  3. Cogitate: http://www.cogitateinc.com/Contact
  4. 9G BACKUP: http://www.9gbackup.com/contactus.html
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Pro Fund Accounting website updated

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The Pro Fund Accounting website has been updated to include social media links at the top of every page. Having these links at the top of each page allows you to more easily access our social media pages on Facebook, Google +, Twitter and Linked In.

Hopefully you will enjoy easier access to our social media presence.

If you have any suggestions to improve our websites please feel free to leave a comment below.

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Pro Fund Accounting website now integrates with Facebook!

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As part of our social media integration, we are pleased to announce that a few pages on our Pro Fund Accounting website integrate with the Facebook link sharing mechanisms!
The current webpages that integrate with Facebook link sharing are as follows:

  1. The PFA Highway page at: www.profundaccounting.com
  2. The PFA Municipal page at www.profundaccounting.com
  3. The PFA State Trunkline page at www.profundaccounting.com

You can expect to see more pages on the Pro Fund Accounting site become enabled with Facebook link sharing links in the near future. Also, our other websites: www.9gbackup.com, www.cogitateinc.com, and www.utilability.com will eventually integrate with Facebook link sharing as well.
So stay tuned to these and more exciting updates to Cogitate’s social media presence!

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Cogitate Incorporated Helps Michigan Road Commissions Control Finances Through Extensive New Budget Package

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Cogitate Incorporated, announces the release of their new Budget Package specifically designed to help Michigan Road Commissions control their tight budgets. Included in the budget package are individually designed Excel reports for line item budgeting, along with Monthly Reports through Pro Fund Accounting that give Managers and Department Heads up-to-date financial information, thus allowing them to make needed adjustments to the budget in a quick and efficient manner.

“At Cogitate, we are all about helping our clients. We saw the need for complete budget control, and are so happy to be able to offer this new product to our local road commissions,” remarked George Loescher, President of Cogitate.

This Budget Package will help Road Commissions keep tight control of the limited financial resources they have. Dan Medina, Director of Maintenance at the Saginaw County Road Commission commented, “This user-friendly spreadsheet provides multiple options from start to finish in creating and monitoring an annual County Road Maintenance Budget. This spreadsheet allows you to compare the history for 3 or more years to see what your final expenditures were in previous years by line item. Once your budget is developed you can monitor it by comparing monthly expenditures to what you’ve historically spent during the same time period.”

To learn more about this new, extensive Budget Package, visit our product page at http://www.profundaccounting.com.

For further information, contact George Loescher at president@cogitateinc.com. Cogitate, Incorporated is rated A+ by the Better Business Bureau and has been in business since 1966.

You can find out more about Cogitate Incorporated and the products we offer at www.cogitateinc.com.

If you enjoyed this post, please feel free to leave a comment below.

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Top 10 Reasons to Use 9G Backup For Your Online Backup Needs

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There are so many different online backup providers out there, that it is difficult to know which one should I choose for my small business or for my personal use?
I hope that with this top ten reasons you should be using 9G Backup for your online backup needs, that you will see the benefit of 9G Backup over some of the competitors.
So here we go:

  1. Speed: The underlying issue that a lot of online backup providers have is the speed at which the data is transferred to their data center. 9G Backup uses highly advanced compression algorithims to speed up the data transfer, which in some cases can increase the data transfer speeds by 50% over the competitors.
  2. Multiple Versions of Files: A lot of online backup solutions will only backup an individual file or folder once. This can be dangerous as if the file at the data center gets corrupted, then you have lost your backup. With 9G Backup, that isn’t an issue since 9G Backup allows you to save multiple versions of the same file or folder. You can have as many copies of the data as you want.
  3. Dual Data Centers: When you backup with 9G Backup, your data is being stored twice in two geographically different locations.
  4. 9G Backup Alerts: In my experience, most of the competitors never really told me when my backup was completed or even if it was completed successfully. They just assumed that since they were always running, they would complete the backup eventually. With 9G Backup, you get a full range of customizable alerts which can notify you to such things as: the backup was completed, the backup was completed but had some issues with certain files, or if your 9G Backup account is low on disk space. Alerts can also get sent to your phone via SMS text message, or get posted to your Twitter account.
  5. Fully HIPAA – HITECH Certified: Now this is probably not necessary for the average small business owner, but if you are a doctor or if you deal with medical records; then HIPAA is a huge deal! 9G Backup is one of only a handful of online backup providers that can safely and legally handle medical information. We are fully HIPAA – HITECH certified, so we can definitely handle backing up all kinds of medical records.
  6. Low Impact on Your Computer: When 9G Backup is running, it takes very little resources away from other tasks that your computer may be performing. When a backup is running, it usually doesn’t bog down your computer so much that you cannot even use it until the backup is done. 9G Backup is very light on its feet as I like to say.
  7. Awesome Technical Support: When you sign up for 9G Backup, you are signing up for a service that is backed by a company who has been in business creating software since 1966. We don’t use outside services for our technical support, you are speaking to live people who are based in the United States.
  8. A Superb Online Control Panel: One of things that I really like about 9G Backup, besides the speed at which my backups go, is that the service has a superb control panel website which gives you access to all parts of your account. From here you can setup different computers to backup to your account, you can see a dashboard view of how much disk space you have left in your account, and you can see a detailed history of your payments. These are just a few of the features that the online control panel offers you.
  9. Multiple Computer Backups: Sort of hand in hand with multiple versions of files, you can also specify different computers in your organization to backup to your account. This is useful if you have a small office of 20 computers, you can buy 100GB of storage on 9G Backup and then setup all 20 computers to have 5GB of storage each. Again the average home user may not find this all that useful, but an IT administrator definitely will.
  10. Runs on Windows XP: With the advent of Internet Explorer 9, Microsoft has been slowly killing off Windows XP, however, 9G Backup is not a casualty of this. 9G Backup can run on Windows XP just fine.

Hopefully, this top ten list provides some insight into the benefits that 9G Backup can provide your small business.
If you enjoyed this post, feel free to leave a comment in the comments section below.

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9G Backup Trademark is now officially filed!

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Our 9G Backup trademark has been successfully submitted and registered with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office!
Check out our official trademark filing information at our company website: http://www.cogitateinc.com/tmwebpage/

It has taken close to a year but now the word 9G Backup is officially owned by Cogitate Inc.

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A major upgrade for UtilAbility is now available

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Cogitate Incorporated, today announced the release of the next version of its premiere utility billing software, UtilAbility. Included in the update is the latest version of Cogitate’s Report Viewer which uses SAP’s Crystal Reports, and several other operating enhancements.

The printing problem was particularly knotty. “This was a tough one since we had to solve the Crystal Reports legal-sized printing issues,” remarked George Loescher, president of Cogitate. “Our customers had been reduced to having to export legal-sized reports to a PDF file and then printing them from there. This release of UtilAbility has uniquely solved that problem for them.”

UtilAbility operates on all versions of Microsoft Windows®, from XP up to and including Windows 8.

To learn more about UtilAbility, visit our product page at http://www.utilability.com.

Cogitate, Incorporated is rated A+ by the Better Business Bureau and is the recipient of the “Best of Ypsilanti 2013” award. Cogitate has been in business since 1966.

We will contact our current UtilAbility customers to help them apply this upgrade.

For further information, contact George Loescher at president@cogitateinc.com. 

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Cogitate Inc has been selected for the 2013 Best of Ypsilanti Award!

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We are excited to announce that we have been selected for the 2013 Best of Ypsilanti Award in the Computers category by the Ypsilanti Award Program!

Each year, the Ypsilanti Award Program identifies companies that we believe have achieved exceptional marketing success in their local community and business category. These are local companies that enhance the positive image of small business through service to their customers and our community.

These exceptional companies help make the Ypsilanti area a great place to live, work and play.

Learn more about Cogitate at our website: http://www.cogitateinc.com.

 

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Cogitate Incorporated is on Manta!

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We are proud to announce that we now have a profile on the corporate growth website Manta.

You can check out our Manta profile here: http://www.manta.com/c/mx0vwf1/cogitate-incorporated.

If you are interested in what Manta has to offer your business, you can visit them at http://www.manta.com to learn more.

Do you have any success stories from using the Manta platform? If so, feel free to leave a comment below this post.

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