From the course: Business Tax Foundations

Creating W2s

From the course: Business Tax Foundations

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Creating W2s

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- [Instructor] W-2s are generally the only tax document that employees care much about. If your employees are anything like mine, by January 2nd, they're going to be asking where their W-2s are so they can file for an income tax refund. So while usually you have until the end of January to send W-2s to employees, doesn't hurt to get them done a little earlier. Let me show you how you can create your W-2s quickly and efficiently. Now, we're using my particular software provider, my payroll software provider, but most payroll software providers have a similar feature on them. So you'll want to look for the area where reports are available. All right, now in your Reports section, you'll probably have an area that says W-2 Forms. You'll want to go and click on that to create your W-2s. Once you've done that, you're going to have a few different options. You'll need to know what year you want to download these for. Again, this is generally automated. You'll want to know which employees you want to download these for. So I have 28, so that's, you know, we'll just download all of them. And then they'll want to know what kind of print option you want. There's generally a few different options. Option A is to use what are called 4-Up Perforated forms. This is basically where you have special paper that has four sections, and it can be divided into quarters and then it's perforated. You can download the W-2s that way and then get them printed out. That's how you see most big companies sending out their W-2s. The alternative to that is to simply use regular blank paper, and then you print out four copies of it. Remember, every employee has to get four copies of their W-2. They have to have one for their personal records, one for the state, one for the federal government, and then one for a local government, okay? So once you've done that, you'll click Download. All right, so once you've downloaded your forms, you should have multiple different copies all on the same sheet, copy A, B, C, and D for use by the employees. Now, sometimes it'll be divided into the quarters. Sometimes it's divided into the top, bottom, and then middle two halves of the page just like this. But if you've done this properly, you should have your employer identification number, employee social security, the amount they were paid, employee address, and the employer address here. And you'll have the state associated with that particular employee. Now you're all set to prepare W-2s for your employees simply and quickly.

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